


Find The Others

by girlskylark



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Future, Ambiguous Relationships, Gen, Give Shiro A Break 2030, I actually don't know what year this takes place, Implied/Referenced Torture, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, Logan AU, Mental Instability, Mental Institutions, Mute Pidge, Older Characters, On the Run, Post-Series, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Shiro shaved his head and is now hiding from the government, Shiro's having a rough time, Swearing, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-19
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-08 02:18:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10375635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlskylark/pseuds/girlskylark
Summary: “No, Pidge—there are no Galra, do you understand me? There are no more Galra,” he said sternly. He ignored the furious look on her face and continued, “Pidge, you’re being ridiculous. The Galra aren’t after us. If anything the government is.”- - -Saving the universe comes with the consequence of not being believed. Shiro suffered the ultimate hospitalization of his fellow paladins, and risked his life running from the same fate. It's been five years, and he still lives under the radar avoiding the hatred of the media, and the people who believe news reports over Shiro's own word. Voltron is real--it isn't just an 80s comic book series and a ridiculous TV show.Five years have passed and Shiro found himself back at Keith's cabin in the desert. Despite his best to destroy his prosthetic, it just comes back--and this time with a twin. Pidge escaped detainment after being relocated to the Garrison for testing, and comes back with a Galra tech arm and a quest to find the others. The Galra that were on Earth before never left, and they're here to take revenge on the paladins for destroying their empire.





	1. How To Forget

**Author's Note:**

> I was inspired to write this after seeing Tumblr user [Solkorra](https://solkorra.tumblr.com/)'s [Logan AU](https://solkorra.tumblr.com/post/158501515786/so-after-watch-logan-this-idea-born-in-my-mind). I've been wanting to write a post-saving-the-universe story for a while and this gave me the push to do it.

_It’s been… five years. Five. Fucking. Years._

And yet Shiro still wakes up like this. Feeling like shit. His forehead felt like a magnet holding his head to the pillow and crushing it all the same. He reached a hand up to ease some of the tension there, but the easiest way to do that would be to go for another bottle… just over…

His hand made a detour for the nightstand. His fingers latched onto the edge of it, slipping, and then knocking down the empty bottle there. It was a domino effect—one bottle took down several others and the mini nuclear bombs went off against the floor. He winced, rolling over with a curse and heaving himself up on his one arm, and his sore elbow. 

Seeing it made him want to fall asleep again. Maybe if he slept long enough, he’d actually _die_ and he wouldn’t have to worry about doing the dirty work himself.

 _Okay, that’s a dark thought for… eleven in the morning_ , he mused, squinting at the cracked screen on his phone.

He sat up and threw his legs over the edge of his bed. There was light streaming through his gnarled window curtains—they were nearly transparent, which didn’t help much, but being drunk and falling asleep drunk made it easy for Shiro to dismiss the light.

“Shiro’s always ahead of the game—you can’t expect us to be on our game like him! Unfair!” Lance’s voice stuck to Shiro’s thoughts as he got up, legs sort of numb and making him stumble—or maybe it was the fact that his vision blacked out for a second there. Perks of not hydrating with anything but alcohol.

He looked around the empty room with a solemn stare, eyes squinty, and stretched his arms up. His vision faltered again, but he ignored it in favor of heading towards the door. Might as well get it over with—it wasn’t like the sunlight was going to wait for his hangover to let up.

The doorway became one blinding white television screen, and a gateway to the soundless outdoors. It would take a while for him to pick up anything but radio static from the wind. He shut his eyes, holding a hand over his brow to block out the light. A little too late he realized that he was still in the shade of the overhang. _Shit_.

His knees groaned as he walked across the porch and past the single rocking chair. He got to the end, unzipped his jeans—he fucking hated sleeping in jeans—and relieved himself off the side of the porch. There wasn’t a railing or anything, since Keith never installed one back in the days he lived here. Shiro could hardly believe it. Five years and he couldn’t seem to think of this place as his own at all. Even after tearing all of Keith’s shit down and burning it into ash, the place was still Keith’s.

He remembered trying to burn his arm with it all—

Shiro’s piss dried out pretty much on contact with the sweltering sand, and when he was done, he zipped up his pants again before unzipping them, and yanking them off. No one was really around to see him anyways—might as well walk around in his boxers. 

Contrary to what it felt like, Shiro hadn’t spent all five of those years in Keith’s desert cabin. Three of them were spent off the grid—he couldn’t even say where, exactly, he spent that time—and after that he did work elsewhere before he realized that the greatest place to hide is right under the noses he was hiding from. Which brought him to Keith’s cabin nearly… what was it? He didn’t want to double check the date because April was the month they all came back from the heavens and landed straight into hell.

But that was five years ago, after the universe was saved yada yada _bullshit_. Did them a whole lot of good, didn’t it? Shiro should have guessed that people on Earth wouldn’t really appreciate that a whole lot. 

It wasn’t like they believed any of it to begin with. 

“I can’t wait to see my mom again. I hope she still makes the best peanut butter fudge bars—I’ll send you guys some!” 

Shiro folded his pants up, ignoring the sound of Pidge’s voice somewhere in his head, because it certainly wasn’t around here anywhere.

He slung his jeans over the crook of his right elbow, just past The Point of No Return, as he liked to call it. The hand that wasn’t coming back. Thinking about it just gave him a headache, which wouldn’t do him any good since he already had a migraine. He turned towards the door again, and his head swam a little before he was able to return to equilibrium, and nudge open the screen. Inside, he dropped the jeans onto the couch and wandered over to the lame excuse of a mini fridge. He couldn’t exactly have cold food in a cabin with no electricity, could he? Perhaps if he was feeling more ambitious, he could put some of his schooling to work, but it’d been years before he used any of that, even before five years ago.

“He’s a pilot, not an engineer.”

 _You’ve got that right_ , he thought to the voice. He couldn’t really decide who’s it was. It’d been over two decades since he even _heard_ any of his professors talk. 

His hand went for the box of granola bars beside the fridge, and he tucked it between his ribcage and his other arm. He then took a beer from the fridge and popped the top off with the same hand. On the way back to the door, he saw his reflection in the mirror and stopped at the sight of it. He moved closer to it, frowning, and turned his head to either side. His hair was starting to grow back. 

After tearing the granola bar to shreds with his teeth, he swallowed it down with a swig of beer and returned from inside the cabin with a razor, shaving cream, and a bottle of water. 

He sat on the steps of the porch and tipped his head forward, dousing it all with water and then scrubbing shaving cream over it. Even in a tin can out in the desert, it still somehow managed to stay chilled. _So I guess there is hope for keeping shit cold around here_ , he thought as he took a razor to the back of his head, and dragged it up. Two swipes later, he rinsed off the razor and went at it again.

“I dunno, I quite like your white patch.”

“You’re only saying that because all your hair is white.”

Shiro spent so much time on his hairline that his skin turned an irritated red, like he was sunburned. He probably was, but it didn’t change the fact that all his hair would grow back in a matter of days, and it didn’t help that his beard came through with a streak of white as well. It tugged on his lower lip into a stripe of white and grey that was starting to spread. He was sure that if he let the hair on top of his head grow out, it’d all be a dark shade of grey. Nearly forty, and he was already growing grey hair. Figures.

He was about to shave his face as well when he tipped his chin up and brought a razor to the underside of his jaw. He stopped, eyes now raised enough to see a mirage on the horizon. It looked like a cloud of ash circling around a spec there in the desert. He lowered his hand, dropping the razor onto the porch and reaching for his socks and boots.

He tied them haphazardly and ran both hands over his head. Everyone recognized him with the white patch. There weren’t many guys around with that sort of hair. Five years ago, he started seeing guys on the news where he found television, being caught and questioned—one random pedestrian actually _shot_ an innocent man whose hair happened to be black with white streaks on either side of his head from age. 

So that was the sort of man Shiro became. Wanted.

He stepped off the porch and squinted at the cloud of dust, realizing that it was coming closer with every second. The horizon stretched for a long while, though, so it would be another few minutes. He went back to the cabin and reached under the couch for the pistol there. He went to the back of the cabin where the shade dropped the temperature down by about ten. He flattened his back against it and stayed there, waiting for the distant buzz of the engine coming closer and closer with every second—

Shiro’s breath stayed even when he heard the engine as close up as possible. There were dual fans that hissed like the buzz of a bee’s wings, and they cut out before the engine did. There was the click of someone’s foot against the pedal, and then two feet jumped to the dirt. Shiro pressed to the edge of the corner, and waited until he heard their shoes on the porch steps. He glanced around the edge of the cabin, and saw what looked like a hover-vehicle. 

_Looks a lot like Keith’s old one_ , Shiro thought. He burned that too. It resulted in an explosion because there was still gas in it.

This one was solar powered, though, and with Shiro’s knowledge of current hover models, it was powerful. This had to be Garrison tech.

Shiro stayed put as he listened to the intruder rummage around in his things. His windows were open, and one was just above his head. He crouched under it and moved around the edge of the cabin, towards the hovercraft. Slowly, he crawled onto the porch, underneath the windows, and went towards the door. He braced the pistol in his hands, and rose up in the open doorway. His shadow cut down across the floorboards, and the stranger whirled on him, one arm raised and gun glowing through the barrel. 

Shiro’s pistol was already clocked and loaded, and the power-up needed to use one of those laser guns would take more than the second his rifle would fire with. 

“Drop your weapon,” he hissed, stepping into the cabin, and instantly the intruder let the handle swing on their fingers. Their arms raised up, exposing the cloth over their mouth, and their heavy head of ginger hair. “ _Drop it!_ ” Shiro demanded. The laser gun fell and clattered on the floorboards.

The intruder’s hand went to their face, even when Shiro’s grip tightened on the pistol. “Don’t you fucking move,” he seethed. “Who the fuck are you. _Tell me!_ ”

Shiro couldn’t miss the glint on their arm, or the black padding on their elbow and palm when they held up one hand, facing Shiro. It looked _too_ familiar, even if he hadn’t spared a glance at it in _months_. For whatever fucking reason, he kept hauling that shit from place to place even if he never used it anymore. 

They nudged down the fabric over their mouth, and revealed the familiar femininity of her lips, even chapped, and the roundness of her cheeks. It took a minute for Shiro’s brain to force him to come to terms with the fact that even five years later, she still looked like such a child. She wasn’t a centimeter taller than before.

His grip on the pistol faltered, and the migraine that pinched his brows together managed to subside for the moment it took for him to stammer out, “P-Pidge?”

She nodded, arms still up and eyes still on his gun. He lowered it, and in the same motion, his ability to control himself vanished. The gun dropped, his arm limp, and his knees gave out. 

Pidge stared at him, jumping a little when he fell to his knees. Her arms were still raised, hands out. He stared at her, and the metallic texture of her _arm_ —

It looked just like his prosthetic.

He wanted to ask what happened. He wanted to ask where she’d been, how she found him, why she was _there_. All that came out was, “P-Pidge—I-I’m so sorry—I’m so sorry, _so sorry—_ ” 

As he babbled, his saliva stuck to his chapped lips, and his burning eyes loosened tears that caught in his beard and in his smile lines that were really just a mock display of happiness he must have felt at some point. He couldn’t raise his eyes past her grubby knees, or her shoes that were a mess of frayed laces and red desert sand. But she couldn’t seem to stop staring at him.

He heaved in a shaky breath, tasting salt on his lips. “Please say something,” he begged, voice hoarse. He couldn’t remember the last time he bothered talking if it wasn’t a curse. 

She stared at him, eyes wide and eyebrows tented. She seemed to remember that she was still in the submissive stance, and dropped her arms. She looked around the cabin before going for the filing cabinet in the corner. Everything was so quiet, aside from her rummaging around the empty metal bins, and Shiro’s shaky, panicked breaths. 

Eventually she sprung forward with a pad of paper and what looked like a crayon. She sat in front of him and scribbled for a few seconds before holding the paper out and pointing at it with the dull tip of her green crayon: “ _WE NEED TO FIND THE OTHERS_.”

Shiro couldn’t stop staring at her metal fingers, and how they gripped the crayon just like any other hand. Her fingers had cushioned black pads, and resembled the quiet, unassuming look Shiro always thought his arm had. 

It took a few minutes for Pidge’s message to register. She pushed it closer to his face, tapping on it harder. It was almost like he couldn’t read.

“Please say something,” he begged again. 

She growled at him, shoving the paper into his face so that he had to wave her off and grab the pad for himself. He threw it and grabbed at her, shaking her by the shoulder. “ _Say something!_ ” he shouted. “I’m not dreaming! I’m _not dreaming!_ ”

Pidge’s golden brown eyes went wide, reflecting the sunlight and the sudden, sharp look of terror on her face. She pushed at him, grabbing at his fingers as they clawed at the metal of her arm. They were both screaming in a matter of seconds until Pidge finally clobbered him upside the head and pinned him on the ground, cranking his wrist back and forcing his hand off her arm. She screamed into his face, slamming his shoulders into the floorboards again—and again—and again until his head was dizzy and they were finally both… calm.

She shoved off of him, getting to her feet, and stomping over to the pad of paper. She picked it up and held it out to him again, this time with both hands. She looked at it, and then him, and at the pad of paper again. 

“ _WE NEED TO FIND THE OTHERS_. _”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm just gonna leave this here.


	2. Back At It

The others were… part of the team that ‘saved the universe’, or whatever. When humanity didn’t believe the story, they chalked them off as _mentally incapacitated._ There were theories about the _Voltron Paladins_ that it was all a group hallucination—a rare, and quite honestly hard to prove, theory. The most widely believed theory happened to involve the leader of Voltron. As leader, Shiro convinced the others of this insane, decade-long battle with aliens. It probably involved hallucinogenics of some kind in order to fully convince the Paladins. Whatever drugs he used on their bright, youthful minds managed to severely disassociate them from society. None of them could function in the world with this story locked in their heads.

So Pidge, Hunk, Keith, and Lance were taken in for treatment, and Shiro was at large. Written off as the man who destroyed the futures of the Garrison’s best students. Their families felt as though punishment had to be executed for destroying the minds of their children. 

“We just want our _real_ son back.”

They never really stopped publicizing it. There was something about Shiro that just prevented people from… letting go. Or perhaps it was the media. In response to Shiro’s ultimate criminal record, a few things came to light—something about an eighties comic book series that happened to be called “the base of their stories.”

So even if the people didn’t _truly_ believe in Voltron, at least the original comics were selling out like wildfire. The original editions were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars these days. All thanks to Shiro having read the comics (supposedly) and convincing Pidge and the others that they were all Paladins of Voltron.

Complete horse shit, if you asked Shiro.

So finding the others meant mental institutions, psych wards, and… _were_ asylums a thing these days? No—and the only reason he knew that was because he saw the news _just_ enough to keep track of where they kept the others.

“Weren’t you detained in Oregon?” he asked Pidge.

She shrugged and gave an uncertain nod. She scribbled something down on the paper and held it up. “I was relocated to the Garrison for testing.”

Shiro stared at her, and then at the arm. He pointed at it wordlessly, and she nodded, and aggressively tore the paper off the pad and wrote onto the next sheet rapidly, crayon digging into the paper. “THE GALRA DID THIS. THEY’RE STILL HERE.”

He glared at the paper, and then at Pidge, shaking his head. “No, Pidge—there _are no Galra_ , do you understand me? There are no more Galra,” he said sternly, staring at her as she started writing more down. He continued, ignoring the furious look on her face. “They’re _gone_ —they aren’t after us anymore. We’re all safe now—well, sort of—”

She jabbed the pad towards him, and he read out, “‘They’re after me, and they’re after you’ —Pidge, you’re being ridiculous. The Galra aren’t after us. If anything the _government_ is. How the hell did you get out anyway? What happened to your hand?”

She circled _THE GALRA_ and held it up. He slapped the pad back down on the table, but she just held it up again, frantically pointing at _THE GALRA_. 

They sneered at one another, Pidge’s lips pulling back over her teeth. Eventually, a small growl pulled out of the back of her throat and she ripped the paper, writing out, “Then tell me what the FUCKING HELL HAPPENED TO YOUR HAND.”

Shiro glowered at her, getting up out of his seat and storm across the cabin. He went to one of the far floorboards and grabbed the edge of the loose one, and ripped it up. The splinters bit into his fingers. He reached underneath the opening after tossing the panel aside, and threw the metal arm out of it. It skidded across the floor towards Pidge, and he shouted, “It’s right fucking there! All right? Now tell me how the _fuck_ you—”

His voice cut off when Pidge bolted up out of her seat. She was glaring at him, and jerked her metal arm to the side. A flare of purple caught along the edges of it, branching out into narrow, calculated shards. The light took over the padding over palm, and circled her fingers in a spark of Galra purple.

Shiro cried out, cussing up a storm as he staggered back into the nearest wall, falling against the top of his mini fridge and knocking down all the empty and full bottles there. One of them completely shattered and sent beer up his bare legs. He was still just in his boxers. 

He screamed bloody murder when Pidge came for him, as if daring him to test the weapon he spent _years_ using—the exact same one that was on the floor now. 

Everything else in the room seemed so _dark_ compared to how her hand illuminated, and glinted off her skin in a vibrant hue of purple. The heat of it felt like it was melting every part of Shiro the closer she came with it. He flattened his back against the wall, his chin rising to avoid the glow of her fingers mere inches from his neck. The sweltering hot surface was enough to convince him that it would slice through his neck without any difficulty.

She studied him, her lips twisted into a sneer, until she drew her elbow back and willed the hand to silence its deadly hum. 

Shiro stared at her, breathing hard, as she stormed back to the couch and grabbed his jeans. She chucked them at him, and he barely got them on before he was suddenly hit in the chest with his heavy metal arm. It knocked the wind out of him, and he coughed, dazed. She jabbed her finger at it, and then at the Point of No Return. 

“I am _not_ fucking put this on,” he hissed at her. She jabbed her finger at it again. “ _No_ , Pidge.”

She came at him and grabbed him by the upper arm, and heaved the bionic arm out of his hand. “ _No!_ Pidge, don’t!” he seethed, and went so far as to shove her straight in the chest. She jumped back, a hand over her breast and a murderous glare on her face.

Breathing hard, Shiro threw his metal arm down and cussed under his breath, heaving up his pants and zipping them up. He kicked the arm aside and walked across the cabin to get a _decent shirt on_ , for fuck’s sake. When he turned back around, Pidge was there and yanking at his stub. 

He yelled at her, but it fizzled out when she glared at him again. She remained as still as possible, mere inches from his face. Her hair was an absolute mess, and dusty orange from the sand outside. Her bangs hung over her eyes, slick with sweat and grimy as ever. 

She kept her eyes on him for a moment longer, ensuring that he wouldn’t move, before she shoved her hand into the prosthetic and yanked out the cap. She secured it over the Point of No Return before she forced his arm into the socket of his prosthetic. After years of not wearing it, it felt like he was squeezing his legs into his uniform leggings again. It was a tight fit, and when the cap clicked into place with the hand, a shock of pain jolted through his arm. 

He cried out, face scrunching up as he shoved Pidge away. He fell against the wall, hand gripping hand, and screamed at the terrifying sensation of having _something_ there. The weight of it sent him slumping to the ground, his knees sprawling to the side, his breath coming out harsh and seething between his teeth. 

He pushed his thumb into the padded palm of the prosthetic, and growled out a pained, “ _Fuck_! Pidge—” 

She knelt down next to him and pushed her palms against his upper arm, where the end of the prosthetic was. It seemed to suck to his skin, pulsing like blood under flesh and clinging to him. She massaged the skin there calmly, waiting for the pains to fade away until Shiro was left sitting, pale and teary-eyed, against the wall. He hit his head back against the wall once, twice, and then once more before heaving himself up to his feet.

He slapped her away, biting out, “Get the fuck off of me.” So perhaps he hadn’t meant to say that, but his arm was still throbbing as he limped away from the wall. His knees creaked as he went for the fridge and the bottles on the ground. He could hear Pidge scribbling away on the paper.

When she stopped, he turned back around and found the pad held out to him. “ _We need to go now_.”

“I’m not fucking going anywhere,” he hissed, but that just made her shake the paper at him. “Not _yet_ , anyway. Stop— _fucking waving that shit in my face_ ,” he snapped at her, slapping the paper out of his face, and then shoving her arms away when she kept holding it there. 

She went over to her crumples of paper and found the one that said, “They’re after me, and they’re after you.”

Shiro ignored her, and with his metal hand, managed to flick the bottle cap straight at her. She barely dodged it by blocking it with the paper, and slapped it down with a glare. He tipped the bottle nose at her before taking a long, _long_ swig. 

She furiously scribbled on the paper as Shiro dropped onto the couch, and laughed at the sight of her message: “I’m surprised you don’t have a beer gut.”

“I still work out, you know,” he argued, still smiling as he finished off the beer. “I could have just as easily went for vodka, you know, but this shit’s cheaper.”

“Har har,” she wrote before falling back on an old message. “ _We need to go now_.” She triple underlined “ _now_.”

Shiro turned away with a sigh. His arm weighed down on his leg, and he stared at it for a while, flexing the fingers. Pidge paced around the cabin, picking through every last thing Shiro had in there. He fell onto his side and watched her as he willed his mind to get fuzzy. He didn’t want to think about this. This wasn’t what he had in mind when it came to seeing Pidge again.

She wasn’t the little girl he knew anymore. She was… older, and it showed on that heavy, _knowing_ look on her face. Or perhaps it was the fact that she actually had breasts now, Shiro couldn’t tell. It wasn’t like they were _huge_ or anything—but he hadn’t seen a woman in a few months so maybe he was spending too much time staring at them—

Suddenly she was glaring at him, and he didn’t realize it until he turned his eyes up to meet her’s. He groaned and flipped around, facing the back of the couch. _This is ridiculous_ , he thought miserably. She has a metal arm. She has a… _clearly_ Galra arm. 

What were the chances that the others had the same?

 _No. Stop thinking about it_.

Eventually, Pidge stopped rustling around in things, grabbed her gun, and took to the door. She stormed out of it and slammed the screen shut. Shiro looked up and over his shoulder, squinting at the dust she kicked up off the floorboards. He sat up a little and squinted out the window, waiting until he saw her march over and drop down into the rocking chair. There, she took vigil.

  


  


He could hear her leg jumping up and down, causing the rocking chair to creak against the creaky floorboards, on the creaking porch in this creaky fucking cabin. Shiro groaned and reached for his flip phone. The small rectangular screen on the front had a chip taken out of it, so he could only see a portion of the _3_ on it. It was three in the afternoon.

He pushed himself off the couch and thought to himself, _Well, seems like this isn’t a fucking nightmare. Might as well go face it_.

Just as he was about to “face it,” he stopped at the sound of Pidge abruptly jumping to her feet. He looked out the window to where she was now on the edge of the porch, gun held tight at her side.

He shoved off the couch with a groan and called out, “What is it?” 

Pidge whirled around, seeing him through the dusty, torn screen window, and pointed abruptly at her gun, and then at him. _Get a gun_. _Right. Good after-fucking-noon to you, too._

He had the pistol, but now he had two hands. He stuffed the pistol into the back of his jeans, yanking his shirt over it, before feeling around for his rifle behind the filing cabinet. He yanked the safety off and stormed towards the door where he could hear Pidge pacing up a storm, rolling the sleeves up on her flannel shirt, and glaring at the horizon. They could see the cloudy mirage that Shiro saw before, but this time it looked bigger—more than one vehicle, evidently.

“Who is it?” Shiro demanded, squinting at the horizon. 

She slapped a crumpled up piece of paper into his hand, and he unraveled it to find “THE GALRA DID THIS. THEY’RE STILL HERE.” written on it, with “THE GALRA” still circled in hard green crayon.

He crinkled it up and slapped it onto the floor. “Well isn’t this just fucking _perfect_ ,” he hissed, looking to her hovercraft and then back at her. “I drive. Take the rifle.”

He slapped it into her hands before she could argue, which it looked like she wanted to do. “Who’s the fucking pilot here, you or me?” he hissed at her. “You weren’t the one trained to fly these things, got it? Piloting a gargantuan _lion_ doesn’t work the same.”

She scowled at him, but followed anyway. They went into the cabin where he stuffed a bag full of his shit—which there wasn’t much of to begin with. He grabbed the few pads of paper he had in here, along with a Sharpie, and the extra ammunition he kept on hand. Pidge yanked the bag out of his hand and shouldered it, looking panicked as she gestured towards the door. _Right, we need to hurry_.

They ran for the hovercraft where Pidge slapped the keys into his hand, and straddled the back seat. He looked at the controls for a second before cracking his knuckles—only his left hand cracked. “Well, it’s been a while, huh?” he said aloud, and was slapped on the back repeatedly for it. _Hurry_. “I hear ya, I hear ya. Relax for a second—”

Something crashed like lighting near them, and splintered in an array of wood and dust. Shiro swore loudly, slipping his hand through the key ring and linking it to the magnetic surface. The engine roared to life, and the fans picked up speed as another blast took off one of the porch posts. Pidge shook Shiro’s shoulders, urgent, and a moment later the hovercraft took off the ground.

They were weightless for a second, the force of the lift sending them off their seats for a second before they took control and spun close to the ground. “Get ready!” Shiro shouted over the fans, and swung the tail of their hovercraft around in a wave of dust that hid their tracks for the split second it took for them to take off behind the cabin, and off into the desert. 

Pidge reached around Shiro and held up the cloth over his mouth— _well that explained what she was doing with the cloth over her face in the first place_. He let her tie it over his mouth, and then placed sunglasses over his eyes. The sand _pnk_ ed against the surface, and Pidge hid her head against the back of his neck where his jacket collar ruffled up. Hovercrafts weren’t even that fast of vehicles, but the flat ground helped—up until the point where the wind kicked the sand up into dunes and then they were just airborne.

They flew up dozens of feet into the air, and Shiro hollered out loud, laughing at the adrenaline rush he used to love so much. Why did he never think to steal one of these from the Garrison? Oh, right, wanted man, 24/7 guard watch… Not exactly the best scenario for stealing shit, he thought.

Pidge’s hands went tight around his stomach, her metal arm knocking the wind out of him with its strength. Their feet lifted off the landings, and Shiro yelled, “Woohoo! Yeaaah!” into the wind that bit at their ears and over his bare scalp.

As they swiveled into the landing, he glanced behind them, and saw the horde of vehicles behind them, jumping over the dunes and getting caught in the loose sand. That was what dunes were made up of, anyway.

They went as far as the cliffs before cutting off to the side and running the length of them. Shiro looked up and watched for the dip in the cliffs—he knew there had to be an end to it somewhere—where the flat desert met the canyons. _C’mon…_ he hissed internally, looking to where the Garrison vehicles started to cut diagonally over the sands, realizing that Shiro and Pidge were starting to go across the horizon rather than through it.

Something hit the rocks just behind them, sending a spray of stone shards into the air. Shiro cursed and ducked away from the wall, moments before another blast sent a shale clump sliding, and clattering to the sand. Pidge sat back and up, looking back at it and then again to the vehicles gaining on them. She unstrapped the rifle from around her back, and all Shiro could see was her reflection in the side mirror, cresting over the curve of her back and shoulders, and her elbow pulled back. 

She squinted one eye and took aim.

But Pidge was never really the sharp shooter, now was she?

Her aim skimmed between two vehicles cutting across one another, and Shiro was sure that if she could talk, she would have started cussing up a storm. Shiro never really swore as a Paladin, but circumstances now more or less required it. Keith introduced the swearing into the team, and they all cussed like sailors--a phrase Allura and Coran never really understood, along with words they never really understood.

Pidge cocked the weapon again and aimed again. This time her shot was accompanied by another, and a ray of rocks scattered off the cliff, and sent Shiro veering to the side, shouting, “Hang on to me!”

Her hand gripped his shoulder, steadying herself, before going at it again. She shot a bullet, and Shiro watched one of the passenger’s fall out the back, and send the hovercraft careening to the side, taking out another vehicle. Shiro lifted a hand up for a high-five, which Pidge gave him before perilously twisting around so her back was up against Shiro, and her aim would be better off now that she was actually facing their pursuers.

“We’re gonna take a sharp one!” Shiro shouted, and a moment later, Pidge’s arm went back and clung to Shiro’s abdomen as he braked and twisted the handlebars, sending their hovercraft coasting and swiveling into a complete 180. 

He adjusted the gears and cranked forward, barely skimming the side of the opposing vehicle. Pidge had her laser gun out and charged, and fired on the man reaching for her. Shiro saw them as they flickered past in a blur, and caught sight of the distinct purple of their uniform—or, to be more accurate, the purple of their skin.

Shiro would have twisted back to double-check, but they were going up the side of the cliff on the ramp, and gliding over the lip of it. They drifted away from the cliff’s edge, and followed the canyon eastward. He could hear Pidge charging the laser gun again, and a moment later she took out another one of the vehicles with a poor shot to the edge of the front windshield. The glass shattered and the driver spiraled out onto the desert.

He could feel the heaviness of his right hand digging into the grip on the handlebars. He could feel how inhuman it was, and how much he loathed having to depend on it. Why the fuck were prosthetics such a fortune? Why did he need this?

Why did they have to give one to Pidge, of all people?

Pidge slapped him on the leg and pointed to the ledge behind them. A Garrison-grade military truck was coming up the ramp, and Shiro bent the mirror to see it better, and by default, saw Pidge better. She held out both hands, and coast them beside one another, and gave him a thumbs up. I hear you loud and clear.

He slowed the hovercraft, and twisted to the side so they were closer to the ledge, and the passenger’s side of the vehicle. He braked hard, leaning a foot out to scrape against the sand and spin the craft. An instant later they crossed paths with the car. Pidge was already on top of the seat, and lunging for it, one hand going to the top of the car, the other on the side mirror. Shiro kicked the hovercraft into gear again, and caught up just as the vehicle door rammed open, and she slammed her foot through the window, clobbering the soldier trying to open the door. 

She hooked inside and her arm blazed to life. She sliced through any metal in her way, and Shiro happened to be just far enough to avoid seeing her grab the soldier’s neck with her glowing fist. A moment later, she ripped her arm back through, and sent something barreling out the window. Shiro veered to the side to avoid getting hit, and when his attention went back to the car, she was inside, and the car was steering to the left, away from the ledge, speed panicking. 

The truck abruptly stopped, sending up a cloud of dust and smoke, and Shiro spun around the front and towards the driver’s side where the door was flung open, and a body was dropped out. It was promptly followed by another, and then Pidge leaning out with a wave. 

Shiro looked down at the bodies and back at her, muttering, “Jesus H. Christ,” before hopping off the hovercraft, feet staggering a little.

The desert was quiet again, aside from the engine on their new vehicle rumbling. Shiro ripped off the keyring from his wrist, and chucked it to the dirt before hopping into the truck. Pidge shimmied over, propping herself up with her legs crossed, and shoulders forward to avoid the gore behind her. Shiro noted it with a glare, and the gap she put into the edge of the door window—it was a miracle that the door even closed now.

Just before starting the drive, Pidge stopped him with a hand raised, and leaned out the window. She looked around for a moment before dropping back in, pointing back the way they came, where the Garrison was farther in the distance. “What is it?” Shiro asked, leaning over to squint at the horizon.

Pidge floundered to say it, and ended up just flapping her hands about before cruising them both forward and pointing at the sky again. “Plane? Helicopter? Well why didn’t’chya say so?” he said exasperatedly, shifting into drive. He knew Pidge was looking at him with a deadpanned expression. “Let’s get out of here before they show up then, huh?” he suggested. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The more ya know.
> 
> I'm gonna leave this here until I finish writing my other book. My guess is that it'll take another week or so—not too long.


	3. Lemonade and Cheetos

They drove until Shiro had a decent signal. He flipped through his contacts in the time it took for Pidge to break into the back of the truck and rifle through everything. He stood outside the truck, metal hand to his hip as he kept to the shade of a nearby scraggly, leafless tree. Okay, so there wasn’t much shade, but at least the truck projected a pretty good dark side to its left. So he stood there.

As he waited for the guy to pick up, he thought about Keith. He thought about Keith a lot, considering where he was living—lived, to be precise. He hated to think that his nephew was going through what Pidge was: a new arm, people trying to kill her, on the run. He hated to think any of the paladins were going through this, but rational thought told him that this was exactly what was happening to them. 

He looked back at the open driver’s door just as the guy picked up. “What is it?” he demanded.

Shiro cleared his throat and said, “Hey. I need a car. Preferably a truck, actually—somethin’ that doesn’t have a whole lot of miles on it.”

“How much you got?”

Shiro’s hands went to his pant pockets, and the answer was definitely _not_ enough for a truck. “I don’t have any cash on me,” he said, and that just earned him a disappointed tsk. “But hey, I’ll trade you for… a military vehicle. It looks like a tactile vehicle, for terrain.”

There was a moment of silence before the guy asked, “Where’d you get it? You have it on you right now?”

“Yeah, I’m starin’ at it,” Shiro said, slapping his hand down on his leg, raising his eyebrows at the thing. “What do you say?”

There was faint mumbling on the other side—someone interrupted the call—but a moment later the guy was back, saying, “All right. You know where to take it.”

“Can we be a bit more discrete than that? I mean—it’s a military truck—”

“Here or not at all,” he snapped, and the line cut off. Shiro sighed, checking his signal again to be sure that the phone didn’t cut off, and it wasn’t just his guy hanging up.

“Fucking perfect,” Shiro muttered, staring at the truck just as Pidge crawled back through the back seat window and onto the front bench. She had a granola bar in her mouth, and she was sifting through Shiro’s backpack. “Hey, what are you doing?” he called out, rushing back to the door and leaning in, reaching over to snatch his bag back. Pidge lifted it out of reach and continued to dig around frantically. The boxes of ammunition clattered around, and she dumped a few of them out onto the seat.

She pulled out pads of paper and Sharpies, and dug around some more. She dropped the bag, chest heaving, and looking at Shiro. Her golden eyes were wide, pupils blown out of proportions. “What is it?” he asked her, dropping his hands down onto the seat.

She grabbed one of the empty pads of paper and wrote in Sharpie, “WE LEFT EVIDENCE BEHIND.”

All the crumpled papers, torn to shreds, balled up— _No_.

“ _Fuck,_ ” Shiro cursed, staring at her sharp, rapid handwriting before slamming his fists onto the seat, “SHIT! _Fuck,_ goddamn it—we need to get moving. But—they’ve probably already contacted the institutions where the others are held. They—They know we’re coming, so… no matter how fast we get there, they’ll be waiting for us. And if they decide to relocate everyone and not publicize it or—or tell just about anyone about it—”

It took a minute for Shiro to finish, seething, “We’re screwed. They’re screwed. We fucked up every chance of—” 

He stopped, watching as Pidge wrote out, “We’ll be fine. Let’s keep moving.”

Shiro sighed sharply, slapping his hands down again before pushing off and climbing into the driver’s seat. As he slammed the door shut, he said, “Ah yes, we’ll be fine! It’s not like the government is after us, and oh yeah, people still want to kill us too. We’re just having the time of our lives, aren’t we.”

He could see Pidge grinning at him from the corner of his eye, and he smirked at her, cranked the truck into drive and pulling away from the scraggly tree, and the rocky structures in the middle of the desert. Shiro rolled his eyes, grinning now as the entire truck shook and tilted, going up the hill of the road. “Quit being such a smartass,” he laughed, slapping her in the arm and cursing it instantly, shaking out his fist. “ _Christ_. I forget how tough the metal is.”

She grabbed his throbbing hand and gave it a healing kiss on the knuckles before slapping it onto the wheel. She jabbed her finger at the road; _Drive, for God’s sake._

It took a few minutes—maybe even half an hour, but then again, Shiro was shit at keeping track of the time these days, especially with his cracked phone screen—before he realized Pidge was writing shit down on the pad of paper. He leaned over to look, but she swatted him away and jabbed aggressively towards the road. 

“We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere—I seriously doubt that I’m going to run into anyone,” he said, and a second later after trying to read her writing, the tires clunked over the shoulder of the road. He steered it back on track, eyebrows up to his nonexistent hairline, and Pidge glaring at him from the side. 

It was a miracle they never came across anyone. It’d be hard to get into any of the cities with a massive military truck. Though, he had warned the guy—this just meant that after he dropped off the truck, the Garrison would be after _them_ , not Shiro and Pidge. Perhaps it was paranoia, but something told Shiro that the Garrison wouldn’t release a military truck outside the gates without a tracker on it.

He sighed and curved over the steering wheel. The wheel itself was massive, with heavy black rubber padding, and the dash was pushed farther back with all the controls. He reached over and drummed his fingers over it, studying the dials and equipment, and trying to remember what he knew about them. He glanced over at Pidge’s dash, where her foot was up on a smaller, piloting steering wheel. There was a dead screen in front of it, and Shiro realized that it must be hooked up to a weapon of some sort. Pidge would know more about that than he would.

It took about an hour of nonstop driving to make it to the nearest town, but they merely gazed out the windows at the dusty gas station and convenience store before moving on. Stopping just meant getting caught sooner rather than later, and with a helicopter somewhere around here, Shiro didn’t want to risk it. He was still attempting to come to terms with the fact that the Galra were after them. It wasn’t that difficult to imagine it, especially when he spent the last five years under the radar because of the government.

It made a little more sense now, why everyone hated him. It was definitely one way to get Shiro under lock and key whenever he risked going into public. He wouldn’t put it past the Galra to publicize his face everyone, turn the world against him, all because he was the head of Voltron. 

Which just sounded like bullshit these days—that’s what the media put it out as, anyways.

Pidge rustled through the backpack again and produced another granola bar. She was about to tear into it when Shiro gave her a look. She shrugged and clamped her teeth around it. “Wha- Are you serious? That’s two in the past hour. When’s the last time you ate?” he asked.

Of course she didn’t answer. 

Shiro groaned and glanced in the side mirror again. The town was too far to backtrack to, and not to mention a risky hotspot, so he promised that they’d stop in the next town and get a decent meal. And quite honestly, he couldn’t remember the last full meal he had. All his food came from the town near the Garrison, and every trip there required heavy concealer over his scars. He never thought there’d come a day where he wore _makeup_ to go in _public_.

Half an hour later, they reached a town farther north from the Garrison and the cabin they left behind. He pulled onto the side of the road, away from the traffic cameras and the surveillance at the gas station around the block. Pidge crawled through the back window, her legs kicking out until they grabbed purchase and hauled her through. Shiro saw her through, and then his eyes focused on the gore on the wall again. He reached into his back pocket and cursed. So much for a trusty flask when he needed one. 

Pidge was kicking around back there, so he reached for her paper pad and flipped through the pages. There were sketches all over it—the sort of thing she left behind in her work sites on the castle ship. Blueprints, calculations, what-have-you. But the bizarre thing about these happened to be the detail of them. Pidge usually forewent the formalities of design, like embossing, paint jobs, whatever the fuck. So he was surprised to find what looked like a logo being recreated over and over, with small details added, erased, _missing_. 

He found them on tools and what looked like a stamp on what she could remember from a license plate number—

“Does this mean something to you?” he asked, holding up the pad of paper. It was all dark back there, so he wasn’t expecting her to pop up from the back, hair messy and eyes attentive. He jumped a little, and straightened out the pad again.

She reached over and went down a few pages. “This is the branding of the company that picked me up when they relocated me. They took my hand.”

“Makes me wonder what they do with all these hands,” he commented, lips pursed as he backtracked to a few doodles of the Galra Empire symbol. The new logo wasn’t exactly rounded and cutesy, as Shiro would put it, which made him wonder if it was somehow connected to the Galra Empire symbol. Having a logo exactly linked to the original would be a bit suspicious, and certainly one way for Allura and Coran to justify coming to Earth.

Shiro remembered the device they were all given before they came back to Earth. It was another one of those distress signals Allura would give to any civilization they helped. 

“If any of you need help, you know what to do. Coran and I will be there in a matter of ticks,” she told them. 

That would be helpful right about now, had the Garrison not confiscated them, and likely destroyed them. They went so far as to dissect Hunk’s before their very eyes, and Shiro stuck around long enough to hear that after breaking it apart, they didn’t have the materials to get it back into working shape. And since Allura and Coran’s ship was nowhere in sight, Shiro had to assume they never used the other four.

Shiro combed a hand through his hair and passed the pad back to Pidge. “So you think that company’s run by the Galra? And if they relocated _you_ , then they might relocate the others. Chances of them taking the others back to the Garrison are slim, considering you were able to break out, huh?” 

She flexed her bionic arm.

“And also because you had that to help you out. I doubt they knew what they were doing when they tried recreating it—they gave you a weapon, which isn’t exactly the smartest thing to do when you’re trying to keep someone prisoner,” he thought aloud, studying her and her arm as she rolled forward and flopped onto the seat. She brought two bottles of water with her.

Shiro sighed at the sight of it, but grabbed one anyways and downed half of it. Pidge sipped at her’s from the other side of the bench, watching him until he finished chugging the water. She crawled over and reached a hand up. He jerked away from her, so she hesitated, and then slowly dropped her hand onto the top of his head.

She rubbed her fingers over his scalp, and if he didn’t know any better, he’d say she was _laughing_. He slapped her hand away, so she sat back down, grinning devilishly. 

“You’d shave your head too if your face was on every television screen for five fucking years,” he said bitterly, jabbing a finger in her direction before shoving open the driver’s door. “You stay here. I’m gonna get us some food.”

He hopped out and slammed the door shut, just as he heard the passenger door open. “What’d I just say?” he called out to her, raising his eyebrows at her as she stared at him through the window, and shut her door. “Get back in the truck, Pidge.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and started heading down the road and around the building to the gas station. He slapped his arms down, muttering in annoyance as he followed after her, scuffing his boots on the dusty concrete.

They wandered through the front door, the bell going off over their heads. Pidge glanced up at it, and then back at Shiro. _Right_. He couldn’t even imagine what her time in the institution was like, but it probably wasn’t spent going shopping, or visiting gas stations in the middle of the Arizona desert. Five years of that, and then an extra decade or so out in space.

So yeah, it’d been a while since she ever went to a gas station.

Shiro turned his arm instinctively away from the cashier at the counter, and went straight for the snack isle. Pidge led the way, and would point at bags of chips and pretzels, and Shiro grabbed them all. They got to the end of the isle, and he went over to the cooked food section, and boxed a few pizza slices and a hot dog before turning back to find Pidge. He found her illuminated by the refrigerator lights.

She looked at him, and back at the case of alcohol. He wandered over to it, and looked down at her, saying, “You want some?” 

She nodded, and cranked open the refrigerator. She grabbed the hard lemonade at her eye level, and let the case of it swing to her side. Shiro was about to go for the six-pack of beer, but she slapped his hand. The metal clanked together, and they both cringed a little. After a moment of hesitation, he went for the case again, but she smacked him again, and then again, until he hissed, “ _All right_ , Jesus. You gotta share that stuff though.”

She just glared at him, cradling the lemonade to her chest and heading off for the check out. A bag of pretzels slipped from his grasp, so he bent down to pick it up before heading after her.

Her wrist clanked on the counter after she dropped the Mike’s Hard Lemonade in front of the cashier. The girl looked more or less surprised, if she was capable of showing emotion, that is. She shared a look with Shiro, and then her eyes dropped down to all the bags of chips in his hands. She pointed to them, her weight shifting onto one hip. “Y’all on a road trip or somethin’?”

“Or something,” he answered gruffly, setting down the food and reaching into his back pocket. He may not have had a flask, but he definitely still had is wallet. 

He slipped out his ID, which she checked before scanning the hard lemonade case. He watched the total rack up before grudgingly taking out a twenty and a ten and sliding it across the counter to her. 

The girl just got the drawer open when they heard a _crack_ and a _fizz_ , and Shiro gave Pidge an annoyed look, but she was already downing her lemonade like a champ. The girl hesitated, smirking a little.

“Where you two headin’?” she asked, counting out the change.

“Yellowstone,” he said. That was north, wasn’t it? “Yeah, we never went when we were kids so… now or… never.” He frowned at Pidge because she was still gulping it down. Honestly, after so much nunvil on the castle ship, a spiked lemonade was probably sweet candy.

“Siblings then?” she asked, scooping up a dime or two before dropping it into Shiro’s outstretched palm. He was thankful that habit led him to become left-handed—the girl was already staring at their arms enough as it was. 

“Yeah. ‘Bout ten year difference,” he said. He hastily stuffed the change into his pocket and scooped up the chips. “Thanks.”

“Not a problem. Have a nice trip,” she said just as Pidge gasped for air and grabbed the lemonade. She took off running for the door, and Shiro rolled his eyes with a laugh. He could see the cashier through the window reflection, leaning over the counter to see them go.

“You couldn’t be more civilized?” he chastised as they headed back to the truck. She was on the verge of a half-jog, several paces in front of him. Inside, she leant over and pushed open the driver’s door since his hands were full. He tossed the chips and shit in before breaking open the togo box and stuffing his face with pizza. 

Pidge at the other pizza in practically two bites, followed by the hotdog before Shiro even finished his slice. Afterwards, she slumped into the seat, ignoring the red stain on her side of the bench. With eyes closed, she popped open a Cheeto bag and started eating. 

After a moment of thinking about it, he asked, “What kinda food did they give you at the hospital? I can’t imagine you had much junk food.”

She shook her head. “First bag of Cheetos in over fifteen years… No wonder you wanted one of everything,” he laughed. She smirked at him, her smile lines showing in the form of half-dimples, and a greasy chin.

While she dug into those, Shiro finished off the pizza as far as the crust, and handed it to her. She devoured it in an instant, glaring at him, as if her judgement were saying, “I can’t believe you don’t eat the crusts.” He laughed and tore open the top of a Junior Mint box. 

“So you must be… what? Twenty-seven or something?” he asked, and she waved her hand in a so-so manner. “Half your life on Earth gone, huh? That’s shit luck. I was twenty-five when you guys found me, I think. Year to Kerberos, year with the Galra… so yeah, twenty-five.”

She signed something, and it took a little remembering for Shiro to recall it. “Yeah, almost forty.”

She grinned a little and popped off the cap on her Sharpie. She wrote, “OLD.” He flicked her in the forehead for it, which he regretted almost instantly because it was with his metal hand. She punched him for it—equally hard, with her own bionic arm. He laughed and slapped her arm away. They fought a little until she nearly crushed her Cheeto bag, and Shiro flicked a Junior Mint at her.

He propped the box up on a crevice in the dash, and started up the vehicle again. Pidge ate through the Cheeto bag, and half of the Sun Chips before she popped open another lemonade with her metal thumb. She sipped it this time, not quite as aggressive. He looked at her every now and then, seeing her sleepy, suddenly awake, unconscious, elbow-deep in a bag of Sun Chips, and finally asleep again, this time against the open window with one arm hooked around the opening, the other clenched underneath her cheek. The wind turned her hair frizzy, and she looked like a kid again with chip seasoning staining her cheeks. 

Though, you couldn’t really erase the bags under her eyes, the subtle scars here and there from five years ago, and the sharper ones more prominent and red and trying their hardest to fade away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :O I just finished _What Summer Is_ so I'm gonna try and take a short break. But here's a little bit to hold y'all over until then. I have a few essays to write (emphasis on A FEW) so that really should be my main priority. But is it? Of course not.


	4. Be Adventuresome

Shiro tried to wake Pidge up about two hours later, and only succeeded to get a fist to the face, and scratch marks on his cheek. He scrambled back, hand crushing a Lays chip bag, and the other held out. Pidge’s fist was clenched around his metal wrist, and after a split second of her snarling at him, her attentiveness came back, along with her consciousness and a horrified look in her eyes. 

Her eyes flew wide open, her lips pulling back down into a frown. She dropped his arm instantly. A moment later she scrambled back to the car window and tugged her hands over her hair and down her cheeks, staring out the front windshield until Shiro sat up straighter and pressed the back of his hand to the scratch marks. He could feel the heat swelling over his eye socket where she punched him.

He glanced at her, eyes as wide as they could go. She looked pale, and clutched at her heavy, pinstriped shirt. 

“Hey, it’s fine,” he said, even though his hand pulled away with a streak of pink on it. It was a shallow cut. “There won’t even be a mark in a few days. Don’t worry about it.”

She started breathing hard, chest pumping up and down. She clawed at the door window, and made a move to climb straight out of it. “Whoa, hey—” he started, scooting over and tugging her by the arm. 

Pidge shook her head; her gnarled, dirty hair grazed his cheek as he reached around her, and pulled her away from the window. She panted against his shoulder, and tucked her eyes against it. He could feel hot moisture gathering on his bare shoulder. “I’ve gotten worse than that, in case you couldn’t tell,” he said, and tried to remember what to do in this situation. He was better at comforting Keith—and his nephew didn’t need that much comforting to begin with.

After a few minutes, she calmed down enough for him to say, “I know it’s hard. Next time I’ll try waking you up differently, all right? I just didn’t expect you to—well, you know.”

She nodded, pulling away and rubbing her hands to her eyes. “Remember that time you guys ambushed me in the middle of the night?” he asked her. “I nearly gave Lance a concussion.”

She smiled a little, pushing the heel of her palm to her cheek and looking at him for a split second. She looked away fast, letting out a shaky breath. “Just—don’t worry about me, okay? I mean, you went for my eye. You definitely know your self-defense. That’s the first place you’re supposed to go at, so in that sense if I happened to be a stranger, then good on you,” he laughed, and she pushed at him playfully. 

He reached over to where their water bottles were. His was empty, but she still had a bit left of her’s. “Drink this. We’re gonna be switching vehicles in a few minutes,” he said. She nodded, settling back in and taking another deep breath, before drowning it all in what remained of her water bottle. 

He grabbed a few Junior Mints from the box and downed them before turning the truck back on. It roared to life, and took them back onto the road where they rolled into the city. They got off at the first exit ramp, and ducked down underneath the lifted highway. The light was fading fast now, and in the elongated shadows, they came to a dusty patch of grass where a few cars were parked around a column. 

Pidge looked out every window before leaning out her own. She popped back in and looked at Shiro, who was gathering up their leftover chips and snacks. He nodded to her, saying, “C’mon, help me put these in the backpack.”

When they exited the military truck, Pidge’s backpack was approximately twice as large as it was before, which meant she had to give the rifle to Shiro. He secured his pistol to the back of his belt, and watched one of the car doors open a dozen or so feet from them. He recognized the man well enough to put a face to the voice he called earlier.

“Antonio, good to see you again,” Shiro said.

Antonio was a short fella, with sharp black eyes and equally dark hair. He skimmed over the vehicle from where he stood, before noting that Pidge was standing there. Shiro hadn’t really worried about her directly until now—excluding all those years she spent in a facility. It wasn’t that he was afraid she couldn’t hold her own, because he was _entirely_ aware of that. 

“This your daughter, huh?” Antonio commented, scuffing the heels of his boots over the dirt as he wandered over to them. Shiro stepped across the front of the hood, towards where Antonio was leaning. “Didn’t know you had a prosthetic. Didn’t realize not having arms was in the family.”

“It’s not,” Shiro bit out, surprised by how rough it came out. Pidge’s eyes never left Antonio, or the guys who were getting out of their trucks. Shiro wasn’t all surprised that Antonio brought his friends along to this. “Which car is it?”

“Hang on—hang on,” Antonio said, voice a mere drawl as he pegged his eyes on Shiro now, lifting up his sunglasses. “Seems like you’ve got some damage on the passenger’s side.”

“It’s just a dent.”

“I’m not talking about the dent,” he hissed. “Who’d you kill to get this?”

“It’s none of your business,” he remarked, and the aggression in his voice led Pidge to seize up, as if preparing to fight. It led Antonio’s eyes to her, and Shiro pointedly pulled her back a tough, a hand on her shoulder. There was suspicion there, in Antonio’s expression as he skimmed over Pidge again, and then slowly returned his attention to Shiro.

“I’m not taking liabilities, Shirogane. You’re enough of one as it is,” he said. “Is this thing tracked?”

“No, and it’s owners are taken care of. You won’t have any issues from them,” Shiro promised. It wasn’t like he’d be able to come this way ever again, so Antonio wouldn’t be any help from here on out.

He held out his metal hand, and after a short moment of hesitance, Antonio clasped it and gave it a hard shake. “I better not have any issues,” he hissed, and snapped his fingers at one of the men behind him. 

Shiro and Pidge stepped back as Antonio walked off, but not without tossing the keys at Shiro. He caught them, and twisted them around his finger. Pidge was still glaring at Antonio’s back until he vanished from sight. And then she was glaring at Shiro. 

He shrugged and said, “What? We got the car.”

That was what he figured, until they both heard the distinct _click_. Shiro heard it enough times over the years to know the sound of a gun being clocked, and instantly jerked Pidge towards the passenger’s door. He barely got it open before the bullets started peppering over the bullet-proof windows and the armored door. He held Pidge pressed to his chest, cursing as he nudged her into the truck. 

Something bit into his leg, but he ignored it as he climbed in after her and slammed the door shut. He swung his rifle around, and unpocketed his pistol. “ _Drive_! Go for their cars!” Shiro ordered her, and through the hole she made in the window, reached out to shoot at Antonio’s men.

A moment later, the engine roared to life, and in a shriek of tires digging into dirt, they bolted forward. The men scattered, bringing a few unlucky souls to Shiro’s side of the truck. He plucked them out one by one with a precision honed over the course of several years of being challenged by none other than Lance McClain.

They crushed into the first car, and the tires picked up on the hood of it. Pidge floored the truck, teeth biting into her lip as she twisted the wheel, crushing the vehicle to smithereens. She backed up the truck, turning it, and riding down the row of vehicles until she parked the vehicle again. Shiro leaned out the door and punched his hand out, taking out the guy coming to tear him out of the vehicle. He kicked into the man’s chest before lunging out of the vehicle and feeling the heated, buzzing sensation prickle across his entire right arm.

The spark of light took the other remaining guys off guard. A blaze of purple light streaked where he tore his hand down to his side, aware of just how blinding the whitish-purple hand looked. 

He took the set of keys Antonio tossed to him, and threw it to the ground. “Hand over the keys to your cars. _All of them!_ ” he shouted, and in the time it took for him to pull his gun up, one of them shot at him.

His bionic arm reacted instinctively, and fast enough to deflect the bullet. The heat of it completely incinerated the bullet, and left a faint wisp of smoke in its place. 

The guy who shot at him dropped his gun, cursing under his breath and making a run for it. Shiro aimed and shot him in the back of the leg before turning the gun on the others. “Keys, _now!_ ” he yelled.

They lowered their weapons and scrambled around in their pockets for the years, listening to their comrade cry out on the ground, clutching at the wound in the back of his calf. Shiro took the first set of keys they gave him, and ordered that the guy point out his vehicle. Shiro didn’t silence his weaponized hand until he and Pidge were at the car, and had to get in by turning their backs on their enemies.

None of the remaining guys shot at them.

Shiro started the engine on the car, muttering, “Well that wasn’t exactly ideal. You okay?”

He looked over and Pidge nodded, looking at him with her back pressed into the corner of her seat and the door. She stayed that way long after they swung around and booked it out of there, crossing paths with the vehicle she completely flattened, and the people Shiro shot. It was unnerving—the way she watched him—but he figured it was normal. He wondered if maybe, possibly, the reason why he didn’t look at her too closely was because he was inadvertently trying to fit her into the mold of Pidge he remembered.

There was no going back to that Pidge—and the same was probably true for the rest of the Paladins.

They drove through a yellow light cruising to the on-ramp of the highway. There was a console for the purpose of making room for the stick shift. Shiro’s first car he ever owned happened to be stick shift, but that was _years_ ago. Every time the car lurched, he wondered if it was an illusion that he could feel Pidge’s eyes on him harder those times.

He turned to glare at her as he shifted the gears and got them into the far left lane of the highway. Her face was tight, her brows condensed.

Shiro looked at her and said, “What? I doubt you’ve ever had to drive stick shift.”

That got her to look away from him, but only for a few minutes before she was right back to staring at him. Maybe it was just him, but wasn’t this awkward? He felt tense, so he reached over and turned on the radio. The longer they drove together like that, the more he was thankful that they’d be finding the others soon. At least then he’d have someone to talk to—not that he was blaming Pidge for not being able to talk. That was all the Galra’s fault.

And it sucked to think that this was happening because of the Galra.

A few miles down the highway, they pulled off onto an exit. They had enough gas, and Pidge gave him a curious look for doing it, until they actually parked and Shiro got out. He whistled for her to follow suit. As soon as he started reaching under the exterior of the vehicle, by the wheels, under the hood, Pidge got the gist of it. 

They searched for a tracker—which they found under the back bumper—and then again for a microphone somewhere inside the cabin. Pidge, being the more intelligent of the two when it came to technology like that, ended up disconnecting the radio and finding the wires to it. She pried out the bug and tried her best to reconnect the radio. The entire time, Shiro internally chanted, _Please let there be music, please let there be music_ , and there was. Eventually.

He reached out to high-five her, and she beamed at him. That proud, nerdy part of her that Shiro appreciated from her. Life on the ship with Allura and Coran seemed like… an entirely different parallel universe from this, and maybe it was—they wouldn’t really know, but whatever the case, some part of Pidge from that reality stuck in this one with they way she smiled over her discovery of the bug.

Shiro crushed it to the concrete and kicked it into the grassy ditch. They were near another truck, and after debating it, the tracker in his hand still, he tossed it into the truck bed of the nearby pickup before turning back to his side of the truck. He skidded to a halt, finding Pidge standing there blocking his path. “What is it?” he asked.

Pidge grabbed him by the hand and pulled him over to the truck. He half-expected her to tell him to throw the tracker out, but instead she pointed her finger to the window of the truck. Shiro glanced back at the gas station they were parked by and figured—the truck they had wasn’t registered, so they wouldn’t have to worry about the security cams catching _that_ sort of information to track them down. And they were already out in the open, so he played along with what Pidge wanted.

The laptop in the front seat.

“You want the computer?” he commented, eyebrow quirking up. She nodded vigorously, and held up both her hands. She pounded her metal fist into her good hand, and pointed to the window again. 

He tried the door first, but of course it was locked, so he flexed his prosthetic. It’d been a while since he used it—clearly—and slamming it through the window glass was invigorating. And by some miracle of God, the alarm system didn’t go off. It seemed even a decade worth of technology couldn’t even get that part right when it came to car safety.

He brushed some of the glass aside and reached in for the laptop. He handed it to her, and watched her scurry back to the truck and hop inside. He climbed back into his seat and shook his head at her as he started the car again.

When he settled back in to the seat, Pidge held up a notebook saying, “Video camera?”

“Nah, Antonio’s not that thorough,” Shiro said with a scoff. “In any other vehicle I borrowed from him, I usually kept shit like that intact. I debated it once, but I think someone else crushed the bug he used to keep in every glovebox. Hence the radio shit. Thanks for that.” He gave her a pat on the shoulder. She was still smiling a little, and tucked her head against her knees as they continued onwards, back onto the highway.

Pidge typed around on that computer for over half an hour. Shiro wasn’t sure what she was doing on it because she stopped “talking.” There was something about the way she stared at him for that long drive from the slaughter of Antonio’s gang that made it feel like she was telling him all about everything terrible that happened to her. There was no way to quantify it. There was no way for him to prove that she said _anything_ , not really. But with her distracted by the computer… it made him feel like nothing was wrong when _everything_ was wrong.

Eventually, she jabbed her finger on the enter key one last time before collapsing back against the headrest, arms up over her head. She sighed a little before dropping her hand down to the notepad and scribbling in it. She tore it off and slipped it into the hand he held out to her. 

“I need internet now. I’m gonna locate the others. Dinner?”

“Sure,” he said. “But I told you, last I heard of Keith he was in Colorado so that’s where we’re headin’ now.”

She scribbled some more, and it didn’t take long for her to dispense, “Okay. But I’m still gonna check” into his hands. He shrugged, muttering “Whatever,” under his breath before letting the paper fall to the ground.

She continued to type away like mad. Shiro wasn’t even sure _what_ she was doing, aside from maybe cleaning off the hard drive or something to that effect. But that didn’t require _that_ much typing, did it? He let her do whatever it was she was doing, mostly because he was powerless to it. He almost feared for the keyboard’s safety, with her bionic hand smashing down on the keys with little regard for their wellbeing. It was like… tiny nuclear bombs going off whenever her metal thumb smashed down on the space bar.

He waited until they crossed the border of Colorado to pull over. They spotted a sign off the highway for restaurants, and Pidge was fast to pick the Chinese restaurant off the exit ramp and to the right. Pidge was still casually sipping from a Mike’s lemonade, and refused to acknowledge Shiro’s blatant scowls for it, even when she snuck one into the restaurant along with the laptop.

Before they went in, Shiro inspected a spot on his leg that had been burning since… he couldn’t remember. He knew he normally had leg problems from a while back during a time when they were liberating prisoners on a Galra ship, but that was years ago. It shouldn’t be acting up now.

He leaned out the open door in the parking lot and propped his foot up against the door handle ledge. Blood was collecting around a hole in his pant leg, so he rolled it up and cursed at the sight. It caked through his leg hairs and dried into a brownish-red mess all along his calf. “For fuck’s sake,” he muttered, yanking his pant leg down again. “I don’t have time for this shit,” he cursed, storming out of the car and following Pidge inside the restaurant. 

They set up shop at one of the window booths after acquiring the wifi password—a necessity that led them to a small, framed code posted on the wall behind the hostess’ pedestal. Before Pidge could take a seat, though, Shiro whistled her out of the booth and jabbed a thumb at the nearest restroom. “Wash up first. Don’t give me that—you want me to remind you that you’ve got blood spots on your prosthetic? That’s right—go wash it off,” he chastised, and watched her slink away to the bathroom with her shoulders sagging. She looked back at him before disappearing into the restroom. 

He waited until she came back, hands clean as could be, before he took a trip to the bathroom to relieve himself and wash up. Dousing water over the wound only seemed to make it burn more, but the chances of there being a bullet still in there was high. Chopsticks? No, that didn’t seem safe. He washed the red from his hands and smeared water over his face, scrubbing it through his short-cut beard before drying off. They both probably looked like a mess as it was, and a simple wash-down in the bathroom wouldn’t do them any good.

When he got back to the table, Pidge was firing away on the computer, nursing the bottle she propped between her legs, and taking long sips every now and again. Shiro watched her with his brows furrowed, and his finger gently swirling the straw to his Coca-Cola. Years ago, he wouldn’t have been caught dead with a soda of any kind, let alone a beer. But with Pidge so exuberant over her hard lemonade, he couldn’t help but order a coke instead. Besides, _he_ was the one driving, not her.

The only time Pidge stopped working was when the food arrived. She nudged the computer aside and smeared a hand over her eyes before diving in. She went for the chopsticks and slipped them out of their slim paper case, and started plucking up noodles from the plate. She slurped them up, and Shiro watched her until his stomach started to beg for the origin of that delicious smell coming from his own plate. He slipped out his chopsticks and started to eat, his eyes still on Pidge, and sometimes meeting her own before her gaze slipped over to the computer again.

“I feel like we shouldn’t be sitting around eating,” Shiro confessed, jabbing at the sticky white rice on his plate. “I _know_ where his facility is. And I’m not saying we just march right in there like fuckin’ Rambo or whatever, but I mean… I dunno.”

Pidge looked at him and reached over to her computer to type. She turned it around after expanding the font size that read, “I’m working on it. We can break in like we used to do with Galra prisoners. No Rambo required.”

“In and out. Easy enough,” Shiro mused aloud, almost bitterly as he poked at the remains of his food. “Still. There’s _always_ been something different about the way we used to work in space. There’s always been more structure on Earth because of it’s… _smaller scale_ or whatever. Breaking into one Galra ship is just… _one Galra ship_. It didn’t mean anything to them when they have hundreds upon thousands more.”

Pidge was typing away, fingers rapid fast on the keyboard. “Yes, but I knew Earth technology before Altean, Galra, or even Olkarian technology. We’re so much more advanced now.”

Shiro shrugged a little, eyeing the way she studied him. Their eyes met, and then her’s flickered down to his arm. His Galra-enhanced arm. She reached over to it and looked at the cap near the wrist, where they used to connect information to. If only the Garrison had listened to them—Shiro could have shown the entire world _everything_ about the Galra Empire just by hooking his arm up to a projector screen.

She flipped the cap open and inspected the ports. She started typing again. “I don’t have the right adaptor for this anymore. USB _may_ have been a universal port to Earth, but then again, we’re the center of the universe aren’t we?”

Shiro surprised himself when he laughed out loud. Pidge smiled despite herself, and Shiro pushed at her arm. “C’mon, let’s be serious here. What would you need to make an adaptor?”

Her eyebrows furrowed, and she started thinking hard. She would start to type, and then reconsider. Eventually she wrote out, “Well, I used to make adaptors all the time since some planets weren’t acclimated to universal conducts—which was fine. But… I feel like Earth technology is its own little sphere. What would you think about having a bluetooth arm?”

Shiro snorted a little, and when he saw Pidge’s wicked smile, he knew she was joking. “You little shit,” he laughed.

The check came, and so did two fortune cookies. Pidge ogled at them before snatching one up and tearing it in two. Shiro broke his lazily and slipped out the paper. As he munched on the shell of the cookie, he read his fortune out loud: “‘Be adventuresome. Try a new look.’ What kind of bullshit.”

Pidge slapped her hand over her mouth to cover her smile. She crumpled up her fortune and devoured the cookie. She slapped the computer shut and scooted out of the booth while Shiro forked over the money for the meal.

Shiro followed her out to the truck, and felt how the air shifted. It felt dense outside, and the heat of summer was starting to chill—rain was coming. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the delayed post! I took a long-needed break from writing. I haven't taken a writing break since... probably January. How bizarre. 
> 
> But anyway! I'll probably post again on Thursday or something like that :) Thanks for dealing with my obscure disappearances. I have a job interview tomorrow and I'm kinda excited for it. I dunno.


	5. To Hell With It

Keith’s facility was in the mountains, about a forty minute drive south of Denver. Shiro was surprised that the nerves he used to feel weren’t really there. It was almost like they vanished with his self-control a long time ago. He couldn’t keep the pit in his chest from expanding, deepening into a mixture of regret, and unadulterated fury. He could see it manifesting in his white knuckles on the steering wheel, and the strain on his prosthetic where his muscles tensed underneath it. 

Pidge was more or less relaxed. She took the sunglasses that she gave him in Arizona, and put them on. She tossed mini pretzel sticks into her mouth and leaned an arm out the window, her hand coasting on the wind. She dragged a hand through her hair and let the breeze hold it back. She kept her laptop secured safely on her lap.

When they approached a sign for the institution, they started looking for side roads. The place would likely be gated, so it’d be a matter of hiding the truck and avoiding the security block guarding the entrance where supply vehicles came and went. Shiro spent enough time at the start of things to know those sorts of details, but after they got in, it’d be up to Pidge to locate where they were holding Keith, or if Keith was even in there at this point.

“So I’m guessing we need to get into a communications room of some sort,” Shiro thought aloud. “So you can get information on Keith. Figure out which vehicles were authorized in and out and the people who come and go, right?” Pidge nodded, and pointed ahead down the road. A dirt path. Perfect.

They pulled down it, and were carried further down the mountain path. The ramp took them further between the pine trees, and the summery air of the valley down below. They found an area to turn the truck around on, and parked it. As they climbed out, Shiro ended up having to inch between the truck and the dirt wall beside him, squeezing through his open door with a curse. Pidge slammed her door shut and stuffed her laptop into the empty backpack. 

Shiro led the way through the forest. There was a steep incline up to semi-level ground, but he was starting to realize why this facility was in the mountains. It definitely made breaking in a hassle, especially when the fencing was on vertical ground, on the edge of cliffs and wedged between pine trees growing from the cracks in rocks. Shiro swung himself up onto one with a grunt, the tension in his arms building as he clung to the wire fence and glanced down at where Pidge stood several feet below. She slashed around with her metal arm, and with a sigh, Shiro faced the fence again.

He jolted his hand to life. It was a miracle it didn’t sputter, like most old technology did. The crosses of purple veins straightened out to his hand where it pooled and spread over his fingers. It enveloped his hand in a blinding white light that he cut through the fence with ease. It was like dipping his hand into a pool of water, but this time he left behind melted tracks. The wires curled under the heat, and eventually he cut out a decent rectangular opening and pushed the fence through. He kicked it aside and reached down for Pidge’s arm.

She clung his wrist, and he grabbed hold of her’s, and a moment later heaved her up onto the loop in the tree growing from the rocks. She sat on the bark and waited for Shiro to climb through the gap in the fence before he helped her through. He _sort of_ put the fencing back in place, but it was more off to the side. Just in case.

“Are you sure you have a decent idea of what we’re getting into?” Shiro asked her, and she gave him a deadpanned expression that led him to roll his eyes. “Well, I don’t exactly have a _blueprint_ on me, now do I? Hey—hang on, stay close. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

She just flipped him off with her metal finger, which led him to flop his hands down to his sides and mutter, “For Chrissake… We should have brought your notepad with us. Why’d we leave it behind again?” 

She dragged her thumb under her chin and flung it towards him, and he was almost thankful he didn’t know what that meant. “Whatever— _stop_ running ahead! Pidge!” 

And then they were running, climbing over rocky ledges and jumping over fallen tree trunks. Pidge was quick on her feet, as she always was, and given Shiro’s _current state_ , he felt like he shouldn’t have slacked on cardio all this time. And working on his strength regimen just made it feel like his prosthetic was suffocating his goddamn arm. 

They were about half a mile from the actually facility, and when it came into view, it rose up among the trees with its white exterior, and blockish structures. Pidge flattened herself to the trunk of a tree, and Shiro followed suit, checking the range of the surveillance cameras. Pidge peered cautiously around the edge of the tree, eyes narrow and focusing on the corners of the buildings where a black box was attached to the ledge. She started fiddling around with her arm, and before Shiro could ask, she lifted it up and a spark of purple flickered on the tip of her finger. She took aim, and fired a laser of light to the lens of the camera. They couldn’t hear the impact, but they saw a thin stream of smoke rise up from it. 

She aimed for the camera down the wall from it—on the farther corner, with a 240 degree wide-angle lens. Shiro was absolutely amazed by her accuracy, and before he could even compliment her on it, she was darting for the back door. “Whoa, hey!” he called out in a low hiss, feet skidding as he took off after her across the grass, onto the concrete walkway around the facility.

Pidge felt around the door handle, and just above it, let her hand blaze to life. She jabbed it through the iron, the metal, whatever the fuck those heavy-duty silver doors were made out of. The lock box cracked and sparked, melting down the inside of the door as she reached in, arm twisting to open the handle. 

She shoved it open with her shoulder, and looked back only to see Shiro’s amazement. She nodded her chin inside, a signal for him to follow, but he was just… frozen. When was the last time they did this? Was she always this… _aggressive_?

He thought long and hard about it—of course she was always aggressive. And they were freeing the others—they needed equal parts aggression and constraint here. There wasn’t time to tread lightly, especially in a place like this. Because it came to Shiro’s attention, fast and with the force of a brick hitting him in the face, that saving the others meant risking the lives of people he couldn’t be sure were on their side anymore.

Fuck it. They weren’t on their sides the second they came back to Earth.

So when they turned a corner and abruptly came face-to-face with a white-coat, Shiro skidded to a halt and cursed out loud. The woman in the white coat jumped, spinning to face them. And that would have been fine, hearing her startled shriek, if only another hadn’t rose up with it. Pidge’s scream was _furious_ —Shiro had never heard anything like that come out of her before. 

She took off, soaring over the tiles and lunging at the woman. A buzz of purple cut through the air, and slashed across the woman’s chest. Shiro staggered against the wall, grabbing onto the corner of it as Pidge collapsed on top of the woman’s fallen body. Her hand was still blazing, even when she grabbed the woman’s communicator with her safe hand and chucked it at the wall. He could hear her seething breath mingling with her hand’s dormant hum.

She kept running.

Shiro stared at the woman on the ground. There wasn’t any blood—not really, anyway—with the mass amount of heat that came with each of Pidge’s punches. He staggered past her and continued after Pidge. He shook his head and tried to steady his skewed vision. _Focus_.

They got to an elevator shaft, and before the doors even opened, Shiro aimed the laser on his finger at the camera inside. Chances were security was already worrying about the lack of camera functionality, so they hurried to get in and slam the gates closed. There were at least three heavy layers of doors that closed with the button Pidge jabbed.

Shiro stared at the set of buttons. Sure, there were four floors to the facility that they saw from outside, but below… that seemed to be where _everything_ was.

“Where do you think security would be?” Shiro asked, realizing that Pidge was staring at it all, two hands braced on the wall above the panel. She shook her head, shrugging. “Fucking perfect.”

The cherry on the top happened to be the flicker of the lights that followed. Shiro cursed, looking up at them as the elevator shut down. “They must’ve locked down. Got a plan, genius?” he asked, and squinted when Pidge charged up her hand again. Suddenly she was coming at him, gesturing for him to boost her up.

He got down and cupped his hands, but she just went ahead and clamored straight onto his shoulders. He grunted, bracing a hand on the wall as he bit out, “Fine, be my guest.”

He just _knew_ she was smirking. “ _Not_ funny,” he hissed out. “I know neither of us thought this would be a walk in the park, but I _told you so—_ ”

She ignored him in favor of punching through the ceiling of the elevator and climbing through. He jumped up, hand going to the ledge, and following suit. She was already climbing up. “So you think security’s up that way, huh? What makes you say that.”

She pointed her glowing middle finger at him before returning to the darkness. Shiro sighed, feeling unnerved by the small pocket of darkness they were plunged into. He opened up his flip phone, but that still didn’t do much good. “Now would be a great time for a flashlight!” he called up to her as he started climbing, feeling his way along the walls. _Whatever it takes, I suppose_ , he mused.

They climbed up as far as they could before beams of light started to cut through the hole they made in the ceiling. Pidge punched through the top elevator door and cut her hand across it. Shiro climbed up next to her, panting hard as he gripped a hand onto the top ledge of the elevator. He helped heave the elevator door open through the slot she made, and pushed his back against the other side. Pidge ducked under his leg and crawled through. He thought she’d at least stick around to help him with the door, but she took off, and he heard men screaming and the ring of guns going off and rattling his eardrums.

“ _Pidge!_ ” Shiro shouted, cursing as he rolled out of the elevator door gap in time to avoid getting his ankle bit off by it. He turned as Pidge kicked off the wall and knocked the gun out of the guard’s hands. She was snarling like a wild animal, up until the point where Shiro shouted, “ _Pidge, stop!_ ” 

It seemed like this guard was the only one left among the people Pidge took out, and somehow Shiro managed to stop her from killing him. Her blazing hand was a few mere inches from gutting the guy, whose face and uniform was splattered in blood, eyes wide and chest heaving.

“P-Please—” he stammered, lips quivering as Shiro stepped up to them. Pidge was looking at Shiro as he grabbed her by the back of her tank top and scolded her.

“No killing. Come on, you know better than that,” he told her, but she just sneered at him and kicked at the gun on the ground. 

His hand darted out and grabbed the guard by the front of his shirt. He dragged the man forward, down to speak in his ear. Shiro’s hand hummed to life. “I’m only going to ask once. Do you know where Keith Kogane is being held?” he demanded, feeling the guy shivering where their shoulders connected.

“I-I do-don’t—”

“Speak up!”

“I don’t know! I don’t know,” he gasped out, sobbing. “P-Please, I don’t know! Th-They don’t tell us anything a-about the people being held here.”

Pidge stomped her feet, as if to say, “I _told_ you so!”

Shiro sighed, scowling at Pidge just as the man started talking again. “W-Wait—I know you. You’re—” Shiro thrust the man back and pinned him to the wall with the force of his metal arm coming down across his chest. The air was knocked out of him for a second, and as his bleary eyes focused on Shiro, whatever name he was about to say was definitely confirmed. 

“You’re gonna tell us where the nearest security surveillance room is,” Shiro started, voice low, “and I’ll let you go. Understood.”

“I-I can’t tell you—” His voiced dropped into a scream when Shiro twisted his arm. “O-Okay! Okay—it’s around the corner! There’s a bunch of glass windows and a secretary just—don’t kill anybody! Don’t kill anybody—” 

Shiro dropped him and grabbed Pidge, hauling her past the carnage and down the hall in the direction the man pointed to. They ran around the corner, ignoring the silent, blinking lights overhead, fashioned beside security cameras and doorways. He could see the glass windows, and the secretary locking the door just seconds before they passed her office. She sprinted to her desk and ducked behind it, and shrieked when Pidge broke through the plexiglass with her metal fist and jammed the door open. Shiro held her back from the secretary’s desk and pushed her towards the back door. “Try not to hurt anybody,” Shiro hissed at her.

Pidge stuck her tongue out at him and he rolled his eyes, glancing over at where the front desk was. They really shouldn’t bother the woman—she probably didn’t sign up for this job just to be interrogated by a bunch of criminals. As Pidge crashed through the back door, he thought about the man he interrogated—the chances of that man being fired were greater than Shiro wanted to admit. He didn’t intend to come here just to kill people and ruin lives—that’s what the media made him out to be, anyway. 

And the chances of the man coming clean about _Pidge_ being the one to slaughter the security guards was slim to none. He could already read the headlines now, of Shiro being the sole person behind this escapade.

There was a hard _crash!_ behind the door, and the thud of someone’s body falling against it. With the broken handle, the door flew right open and a man fell out with it, staggering and trying to get to his feet. Shiro was about to go to him—for what purpose? He really didn’t know—only to be stopped by the clatter of glass shattering behind him. He ducked, hands going up to shield the back of his head.

He dove for the ground behind the desk and pressed his back to the wall. He cursed as he reached behind him, feeling for the lump of metal pressing into his lower back. As he pulled out the pistol, he caught sight of the woman still hidden beneath her desk. Her eyes were the size of Mars now, all golden and brown and red around the edges. He released a shaky breath as someone shouted from outside the office, voice muffled by what he assumed was a mask. 

“Come out _now!_ Hands where I can see them!”

_That’s one way to get a bullet through both hands_ , Shiro thought to himself.

A gun was fired from beyond the broken-down door. The man on the ground covered his head as a spray of glass shattered against the ground again. _Pidge_. “ _Pidge!_ Put down the gun!” Shiro shouted, but she relieved every last bullet, sending the soldier outside down below the divider, away from the windows. “ _Pidge!_ ” 

She stepped through the doorway and pointed the gun at the back of the guard’s head. Shiro was halfway to his feet, and paused, watching Pidge’s eyes focus on his own. “Whoa, hey, what’d I say,” Shiro hissed, letting his pistol swing uselessly against his thumb. She jabbed the gun again, demanding with force, “Let me kill him!” 

The secretary woman let out a strained cry, slapping her hands over her mouth. The man on the ground begged, “P-Please—” only to be silenced by Pidge’s gun going off. 

She abruptly went towards Shiro, pointing the gun at the woman. The secretary screamed out loud, sobbing against her hands as Shiro darted up to block Pidge. “Whoa! No—give me the gun! Pidge, _now_!”

He could see just how furious she was. Just as he was about to grab the gun from her, pain ruptured in his shoulder. The force of it threw him back against the cabinets. The pressure of blood ruptured through the wound, rushing all too fast. He saw Pidge’s eyes go wide, her wild, untamed hair cutting across the distressed lines on her forehead. She stumbled towards him, grabbing for his good arm and nearly falling with him. It wasn’t that he was about to faint or anything of that sort—such the shock of it took him off balance.

She frantically pushed her hands to his shoulder, fingers quivering with blood. She heard the crush of boots on glass, entering the office. She felt the cold handle of the gun in her hand. Turning, she saw the soldier stepping towards her, and saw the world bubble under her spike of adrenaline. 

The soldier held his hands up in a pseudo-calming fashion. “Hey now, don’t be afraid. Drop the gun now,” he ordered, voice muffled and highlighting his sharp, panting breaths. He was _terrified of her_.

_Good_. 

She pointed the gun and bolted up, coming at him in two quick strides. She fired the pistol several times before landing a hit between the soft fabric connecting his bulletproof vest to his helmet. Red spurted out of the hole in his neck as he collapsed. _Fuck her awful, shaky aim._ She was _pissed_ and didn’t need shaky hands from the adrenaline—new target—

“P-Pidge, c’mon—don’t—” Shiro started when she aimed her sights on the woman again. Her hands shook, the tension in her arms showing in her toned, lean muscles. Shiro was getting up off the ground, and clasping his hand over his shoulder wound. “ _Pidge_ , put the gun down. I’m not going to say it again.”

She aggressively chucked it against the wall. It may not have shattered, but something broke on the way down to desk it sprawled against. The woman flinched, staring wide-eyed at Pidge as she turned to help Shiro into the security room.

Pidge swung her backpack around and pulled open her laptop. She plugged it into the computer system to download any information she could grab on Keith, the others, everything. As she did that, she began searching for the list of inhabitants within the facility. “Check the deliveries—see if they moved him out at all,” Shiro ordered, and she opened another file-sorter on one of the connected monitors. In one of the dead ones, he saw the reflection of someone coming to stand in the doorway.

He turned fast, pistol half-up, but stopped at the sight of the woman there. “Y-You’re Takashi Shirogane, aren’t you?” she asked.

Pidge acted fast, but not fast enough to avoid the arm Shiro jolted out to stop her from going at the secretary woman. The woman was in uniform, with her hair tied back underneath the standard cap most institution centers ordered. The last thing they needed was an inhabitant to tear someone’s hair out—better to lose a hat than one’s head.

“I am. I’m… sorry you had to see all this,” he apologized, and snapped his fingers for Pidge to focus on the computers. He could deal with this person himself. “Pidge got a little out of hand.”

Her eyes flickered over to Pidge, who was glaring at the screen. “Pidge?” she repeated. “That’s… the name of the girl in the comics. You mean Katie Holt?”

The name didn’t really bother Pidge, but the insinuation that her fake name was a fraud definitely did. Shiro wasn’t exactly _used to it_ —it wasn’t like he went around talking nonsense about the Paladins, because that just confirmed everyones’ theories—so it caused his eye to twitch in annoyance. “She goes by Pidge. For the most part,” he corrected. “But yeah, Katie.”

The knowledge of it processed quickly. “So you’re here for Keith then,” she commented, stepping further into the room with her arms crossed. She had the expression of someone who felt like she had the upper hand. “How do I know this is actually Katie? We haven’t gotten word about an escape at all.”

“You probably never got word that she was relocated for testing, either,” Shiro commented, narrowing his eyes at her. “So you keep in contact with the other facilities?” The woman’s lips tensed, eyes narrowing at Shiro. 

“We’re a correction facility—our patients are _not_ experiments,” she hissed.

“Tell that to her missing hand,” Shiro bit out. “Do you know where they’re keeping Keith?”

She laughed a little, hollow and almost sarcastic. “I am _not_ helping you kidnap your nephew.”

He felt a tap on his arm, and it reminded him of the heat pulsing and throbbing in his shoulder. He glanced over at Pidge, who made a motion with her hand that said, “Wrap it up” before she yanked the cord out of her computer and snapped it shut. She stuffed it into her backpack. 

“You’re right, you aren’t,” he said. “Because kidnapping suggests he doesn’t want to come with us. I’m sure all that ‘kidnapping’ nonsense goes to you fuckers.”

She gawked at him as Pidge ran out of the room, stomping straight onto the back of the dead man in the doorway, and vaulting towards the door. Shiro followed after her at a careful jog, his bad leg pulsing, but a smirk on his face nonetheless. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When you hint at the subtlest bit of sexism in Voltron when Shiro's like, "You can't go on the mission Princess" and Allura's like, "I do _not_ need your permission" and everyone just looks at Shiro like, "O shit." I never really processed that a whole lot until after I wrote this and was like, "Well damn. I just sorta redid that didn't I." 'Cause Pidge is all, "SHE MAY BE A GIRL BUT I'M GONNA KILL HER ANYWAY" and Shiro's like "HO DON'T DO IT."
> 
> End murder sexism. Let Pidge kill all these hos who ain't loyal 2k30.
> 
> Talk to me on [Tumblr](http://girlskylark.tumblr.com/) or whatever if you wanna fight about fanfiction. I can fight all day about fanfiction.


	6. Next Target

Blood was gushing down his arm and causing the surface of his prosthetic to become slick. Gripping onto the beams going down the elevator was starting to become difficult, especially with the damp blood on his fingers. He was grateful when they got down to the level they needed, the one where Keith was.

All of the hallways down there were separated in increments by heavy metal doors that locked and blinked red from the lockdown. Pidge cut through every last one of them, kicking down pieces of metal and flinging partial doors at anyone who came in their way. Shiro couldn’t lift one of those for the life of him, especially not with the state of his arm.

They didn’t need a key to get into Keith’s room.

Pidge clawed the door frantically to open it, her sweltering fingers burning through the metal and blinding with white light. They broke into the observation room where a sheet of bulletproof glass spread across the length of a pure white room. Shiro ran to it, feeling his heart racing in his chest. His hands went to the glass, unintentionally banging on it and catching the attention of the man laying in the bed. 

Keith turned towards the window, eyes unfocused and unable to see them. A one-way mirror. Shiro’s breath choked in his throat at the sight of his nephew there, with his pale angular face gaunt and displaying heavy purple shadows around his eyes. A sob broke through Shiro’s mouth before he could stop it. “Keith… Keith! _Keith!_ ”

There was a door to the side that Pidge slammed her fist through with the force of a shining purple hand. Instantly Keith was on his feet, staggering and swaying against the wall. He looked… _horrified_ , and completely out of it. His eyes were red, and Shiro saw the shade of it reflecting in his raw, chewed-up fingernails and the sudden scratch marks around his neck where he clung to in fright. 

He was drugged. He didn’t know what was going on.

“Whoa, whoa! Slow down, Pidge!” Shiro shouted, running to her and tearing her away. He took care of the rest of the door, breaking the lock and heaving it open. The threshold led to a completely different world. A pure, white world with nothing more than shadows, and the dark figure of Keith’s hair cut short to his scalp. 

Shiro stepped in slowly, ordering that Pidge keep a look out.

The floor was cushioned, soft. Like it was layered in a heavy comforter. Without the sound barrier, he could hear Keith’s quiet, panicked breaths. “Keith,” Shiro started, voice cracking. “Keith, it’s me, Shiro.”

Keith’s voice rasped, trying to talk and coming out in a whistle of air. The lump in Shiro’s throat only grew. “It’s okay, I’m not—I’m not going to hurt you,” Shiro promised. “Pidge is here too. We’re gonna get you out of here, okay?”

Keith’s eyes were wide, and with how skinny his face was, they only seemed to bug out. After a moment, Keith nodded, but he made no attempt to move. Shiro came closer, hands out and shaking a little. He came close enough to see the veins in Keith’s eyes, and the claw marks on his neck past the fabric of his white hospital clothes. 

Shiro’s adrenaline was causing even the subtlest of movements to quiver. He took hold of one of Keith’s hands, and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I’m going to carry you, okay?” Shiro said, and Keith shook his head fast, glassy eyes dissolving into tears.

He kept mouth, “ _No, no—_ ” but let Shiro link his arms around his neck. Shiro ducked down and swept Keith’s legs out from under him. 

He weighed _significantly_ less than he should have.

Shiro walked out the door and picked up on the sounds of gunfire in the hallway. Pidge ducked into the room, firearm to her chest. She saw Shiro and Keith, her eyes widening. “What is it?” Shiro demanded. Her focus went from Keith to Shiro, and then suddenly she was out the room kicking someone in the stomach as they snuck up behind the wall. She knocked the guy out and motioned for Shiro to hurry. 

They sprinted down the hallway in search of the nearest stairwell. It took about two flights for Shiro’s arm to remind him that _um, yeah, you have a bullet in your shoulder and your leg isn’t doing too great either_. He stumbled onto the next flight platform, setting Keith down as he cursed the bullet in his arm. Keith’s white uniform was completely soiled by a strip of red across his back and shoulders. 

Pidge was growing impatient, and went to pick up Keith herself. She heaved him up, his head lolling to the side. She tipped him so his cheek landed on her shoulder, and she started running up the next flight of stairs with Shiro staggering behind her. 

Every door was just another wall to cut through, and with Pidge carrying Keith, Shiro had to activate his hand and cut through the locks and rip the doors open. His right arm was barely functional at this point. The heavy metal hung loosely at his side as they ran across the grass, jumped down from the tree that looped up. He used his good arm to shoot at the soldiers that jumped from the vans parking up close to the facility. Their truck was untouched, but when Pidge pulled the truck out, they got a bullet through the truck bed door, and another into the side, just above the back wheel.

Shiro collapsed into the back seat with Keith against him. Keith’s eyes were half-lidded, and all of his limbs were loose and dangling off the seat. Shiro’s arm was gushing blood as if it never stopped bleeding, and eventually he passed out against the window, breath raspy but somehow his chest still managed to feel… lighter.

  


  


Someone was patting his cheeks. At first it was light, and then it was a full-blown slap.

A groan slipped past his lips as he arched his back, shoulders screaming from the effort. He cursed out loud, the air wheezing out of his lungs. “Oh— _fuck_ , what the hell—”

He opened his eyes and squinted, coming face-to-face with a piece of paper. Apparently it was prepared ahead of time, for when Shiro finally woke up. “Keith took out the bullets from your leg and shoulder. Your leg’s a mess right now so here’s a lemonade.”

It took a second for Shiro to get past anything after “Keith.” He pushed himself as best he could, wincing as he looked around the truck. He couldn’t find Keith anywhere, but he found splotches of blood smeared over the window and the open door, where Pidge was leaning through. She lowered the paper pad and turned to the next page. 

“Wait—where’s Keith?” he asked, but was interrupted by Pidge holding up, “Keith’s in the truck stop bathroom changing.”

Shiro sat up faster, but his head swam and it felt like he was a mile underwater. His headache was worse than any hangover he had these past five years. “ _Fuck_ ,” he hissed out between clenched teeth. He held a hand up to his burning, _aching_ shoulder. It wasn’t _agony_ , really, but it definitely felt like a pencil was still lodged into the meat of his shoulder.

Pidge held out a bottle of something—pills, Advil, probably. He took two and downed them with the Mike’s she offered. As he drank, she started writing shit down. “We’re on our way to Lance.”

“No—no, no. We’re closer to Hunk,” Shiro bit out, and before she could start furiously writing, he said, “We are _going_ to get _Hunk_. Lance is on the _East Coast_. We’re closer to Texas than we are to Maine.”

She glared and him and scribbled in, letters complete chicken scratch: “We were closer to Hunk in Arizona than we are now so what’s it matter.”

“I am Keith’s legal guardian—it’s _my_ responsibility to prioritize his safety,” Shiro hissed, earning a glare from Pidge. He stared her down, and when she looked to her paper to write, he grabbed it and flung it across the cabin. “ _No_. We aren’t wasting time by doubling travel time.”

He was now leaning out of the car, challenging the aggressive look on her face as she stared at him. He saw from the corner of his eye a figure walking towards them, and looked to find Keith there, dressed in tattered jeans and a red jersey patterned with a white hem and stripes down the sides. He was tugging on the fabric, as if it was uncomfortable on his skin.

“Keith—” Shiro started, voice breaking off as he stood up against the pained attentiveness of his leg. Keith ran to him, throwing his arms around Shiro’s torso and hugging him tightly. Keith was always lean, but now Shiro could feel the skinniness from between the spaces of his ribs, through the shimmery fabric of his jersey. The remaining tension in Shiro’s chest convulsed, and spilled out through his tears. Keith’s shoulders shook against him, his breath coming out broken and blubbering between breaths as he tried to talk.

Shiro couldn’t remember the last time he felt so incredibly relieved. He felt the knot in his chest loosen and relax as he leaned over Keith’s scrawny frame.

“Thank God you’re okay,” Shiro said, pulling away to rub his hand over his eyes. “Shit, I’m crying. Sorry.”

Keith shrugged and did the same, smiling wide with his eyes red and veiny.

“Can you talk?” Shiro asked with a sniff, leaning back against the car seat. Keith shrugged again, and Shiro laughed. “What do you mean? What kind of half-assed—”

Keith cleared his throat, and just from that Shiro knew that not much would come from it. He tried to say something beyond the rasp of his voice, and all that came out was, “I can’t—” with his hands tried to say everything that he couldn’t. Shiro offered the lemonade to him, and as Keith sipped from it, he asked Pidge to get the pad of paper he threw across the car. She scowled at him, but went after it anyways.

“What’d they do to your voice?” he asked, taking the pen and paper and passing it to Keith.

His nephew shook his head, swallowing down a gulp of lemonade. “I think… no, no—I just haven’t… talked in a while. I don’t know what happened to Pidge,” he said, clearing his throat again. His voice was hoarse, like he spent all night screaming. “She hasn’t… said anything about it?”

Pidge snatched the paper and wrote, “Har har” on it. Keith smirked a little, scrubbing a hand over the side of his face as he looked at Shiro again.

“No, I haven’t really asked,” Shiro confessed. “I figured if she wanted to write something about it, she would.” Pidge shrugged at that, and didn’t add to it. “Why wouldn’t you talk?”

“I don’t know. No reason to,” Keith confessed, folding his arms over his chest. “They didn’t want me to talk, so I didn’t. If I talked about anything, no one would come by the room for days.”

“Anything? That’s kind of vague and unreasonable.”

“Well, not so unreasonable considering…” he said, voice faltering. He swallowed hard and took another sip of the lemonade. “I can’t really remember much at first. ‘Cause they kept me drugged and shit because I wouldn’t stop screaming and… I kept _screaming_ even though—they told me—th-the only times I’d get t-to _eat_ or _anything_ were if I-I stopped talking about—and I was so disoriented I didn’t know what was going _on_ so I c-couldn’t stop screaming whenever someone _came in the room—_ ”

“Hey, it’s okay now—”

“ _No it isn’t!_ ” he yelled, or at least meant to. It came in a soft, raspy scream hardly above a whisper. “It _isn’t okay!_ Th-They t-took you guys away and _Lance—_ ”

Keith scrambled to a halt at that, nothing but a squeak coming out as he twisted his hands in his shirt. Shiro couldn’t remember a time when Keith looked so distressed—and his nervous mannerisms reminded him of when Keith was a kid and worried over the horror movies he forced himself to watch. Before Shiro could reason when him, Keith was shrieking all over again:

“We need to find Lance! Where is he? W-We can’t leave him, we _can’t—_ ” Shiro was sure he would have kept on like that, but Keith’s voice failed him and turned into scratchy little squeaks.

“I know, but we’re closer to Hunk right now so we’re going there. We’ll get to Lance, I _promise—_ ”

A piece of paper was shoved into his face. “They already know we’re coming. They’re expecting us to go to Hunk first.”

“Shiro, please,” Keith begged, and maybe if Shiro wasn’t already so stressed about the entire ordeal, he might have caved. It’d been _years_ since he saw Keith, and he thought he’d be able to give his nephew _everything_. He thought that’d be the case for the rest of his life. But he had to think rationally here.

“No. We’re going to Hunk. Don’t fight me on this,” he hissed, and pointedly looked at Pidge. He could tell she had something written on her notebook, but she didn’t show it. “Now get in the truck. We’re going to Texas.”

Shiro was about to walk, but cursed and nearly fell against the open door. He swore his leg, and lifted it a little only to feel like all the blood was rushing out of his foot. Pidge caught his arm and held him up, only to shove him into the back of the truck. “What the f—” he started, but she snapped her fingers in his face and jabbed her finger to the seat. “All right, all right. I’ll stay back here. But for the record, I don’t _need_ my left foot to drive.”

She tsked at him and slammed the door shut behind him. She snapped her fingers for Keith to get in the passenger’s seat, but he didn’t move. He was still glaring at Shiro through the door. “I’m not going anywhere unless it’s to get Lance.”

“We’ll get him as soon as we get Hunk,” Shiro yelled so he could hear, and after a moment of hesitation, Keith finally climbed into the passenger’s seat. As Pidge settled into the driver’s seat, Shiro rifled around in their junk food collection and tossed a bag of Lays chips to the front. “We don’t have anything nutritious.”

“Clearly,” Keith muttered, taking a long swing from the Mike’s before breaking open the Lays chip bag. He munched on one and moaned out loud. “ _God_ , I’ve missed these…” For the remainder of the next thirty minutes, it was constant crunching and the rustling of the bag. “Half of them are crushed.”

“Yeah, well, we’ve been a bit all over the place since we got ‘em, so don’t be surprised,” Shiro muttered, tossing his good arm over his eyes with a groan. It felt like his shin was pulsing where the bullet bit into the meat of his calf. Talk about a bad situation. And with the way Pidge was acting, he wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to lock him up in the truck when it came to getting Hunk. He’d only slow them down.

  


Shiro didn’t realize he passed out until he was opening his eyes to a roaring headache, and a sick feeling to his stomach. It was like someone snapped his fingers and _boom_ , there he was, pain on nearly every bit of his body. His metal arm was aching against the rigid metal of his prosthetic, and it was just making the wound in his shoulder worse. He sat up with a curse bit between his teeth, and he wrenched the prosthetic free. 

Pidge was slapping her hand on the console and snapping her fingers at him, so he hissed out, “ _Shit_ , you’re not supposed to _sleep with it on_. Quit badgering me.”

“You aren’t?” Keith asked, voice quiet. That seemed to be his neutral volume now.

“ _No_. It screws with your shoulders,” he said. “And I don’t think Pidge has had her’s long enough to know that, huh?”

She shifted so that he could see her glaring through the rearview mirror. “And you can’t sleep certain ways otherwise your limb swells and the prosthetic doesn’t fit as well. Hence the struggle we had when you _forced_ me to _wear it_.” She flipped him off as he unscrewed the cap on his stump. Keith was looking at him, eyes on his stump of a hand, and then lifting to meet Shiro’s gaze.

“You never showed us what your arm looked like without the prosthetic. I just assumed…”

“I don’t think Galra technology is advanced enough for replicating a human elbow on top of all the joints in a hand,” Shiro commented, leaning back against the window. “Besides, if they took my elbow, my prosthetic would be all over my shoulder blades. I’ve done some research since coming back—it wasn’t like I was in the military to know all these things about amputee victims.”

“Do you think they would have done the same to me?” Keith asked, looking down at his own right arm and turning his hand over again and again.

Shiro glanced over at Pidge, who only shared a brief look with him through the rearview mirror before focusing sternly on the road. From what he considered, Shiro answered with, “Well… it seems as though they did more extensive research on Pidge, and the surgery was done at the Garrison. They would have taken you to the Garrison.”

“But why would they just do this to Pidge?” Keith asked. “Why would they knowingly give her a weapon? How were they capable of _using Galra tech_?” His voice sputtered out, and he started coughing and cursed it. “ _Fuck_ —my lungs f-feel like I j-just ran a marathon.”

Shiro studied him for a moment, and considered the possibility of elevation being the case—but that was unlikely. Keith’s eyes were still tinted red, and he looked paler than usual. “How did they drug you?” he asked.

“Fuck, I don’t know,” he confessed with a cough. “They barely came in the room at all—maybe in my food?”

Pidge circled her finger around in the air. “Maybe they gassed you,” Shiro suggested. “You might have been constantly exposed to it—you’re sweating.”

“I’m _fine_ ,” he hissed, slapping Shiro’s hand away when he went to feel Keith’s forehead. 

But of course he wasn’t fine. By the time they were out of the foothills of the Rockies, Keith was practically wheezing in the front seat like he was a chainsmoker who just went cold turkey. They took a break on the side of the road so Keith could just lay there squinting at the overcast. Shiro took the sunglasses from Pidge and nudged them onto Keith’s over-exposed eyes. “Th-Thanks,” he hissed out. It came out in a whistle of air.

“I wonder if you’ll need an inhaler or something,” Shiro commented, looking to Pidge. 

She held up a piece of paper that said, “I’m no doctor.” 

“You’re not an English teacher either, now are you?” he remarked, and Pidge smirked at him. 

“I just—need a second,” Keith huffed out, holding his shirt up off his chest. Shiro leaned out of his seat in the truck, but any pressure on his leg was just asking for the stitches to rip, or something to rupture again. It was bizarre watching his nephew sprawl out in the ditch on the side of some country road surrounded by corn fields and alfalfa sprouts.

Pidge wrote something down on her paper and handed it to Shiro. “We might need to raid a CVS or something.”

“We aren’t ‘raiding’ anything,” Shiro said, scowling at her. She shrugged. “We’ll buy an inhaler like any normal person.”

“Don’t—you need—a prescription for that?” Keith asked. 

“They probably did this on purpose in the case you tried to break any of us out,” Pidge wrote out.

“That’s ridiculous,” Shiro hissed. “Besides, they probably chose gas over oral drugs because if Keith saw their faces he’d know they were Galra without a second glance. They probably wanted to keep him out of that to make their rumors more believable. Us saying the Galra did it, and Keith saying he never saw any Galra in the facility— _really_ plays right into their hands, don’t you think?”

“Galra?” Keith repeated, heaving himself up into a seated position and turning to face them. His eyes tensed, flickering between the both of them all red-faced from losing his breath—and also quite possibly the fact that it was scorching hot out in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere. Keith probably hadn’t seen the sun in years. 

_Vitamin D deficiency_ , Shiro considered, before realizing that Pidge wasn’t exactly the talkative one here, and Keith needed answers. “The Galra were involved with Pidge’s amputation, and transferring her from California to Arizona where the Garrison is. We’re assuming that the Galra are behind the whole media escapade with the help of the Garrison to back them up. It’s why everyone thinks I essentially kidnapped the four of you and yada-yada-yada one big shit-show.”

“Wait—what?” Keith gasped out, clutching at his chest. He pushed himself off the grass until Pidge bolted over and shoved him back down. “Get off me! W-Wait—hang on… what’s this—about _kidnapping us_? You— _kidnapped—_ ”

“ _No_! Holy shit I was just explaining it,” Shiro bit out. “Everyone thinks I had something to do with screwing you all up into thinking Voltron is real. Everyone thinks Voltron is just that… _fucking_ awful cartoon from the eighties, and there’s comic books and whatever-the-fuck. Bottom line is that I’ve been under the radar since you guys were institutionalized.”

“Wait—Voltron’s a cartoon and there’s… _comic books_?” Keith blurted out, slapping his hands down onto the grass as Shiro dragged his own hands over his face, muttering, “For fuck’s sake…”

Pidge dove into the truck for the backpack and whipped out her laptop. She sat it on the passenger’s seat and nudged Keith over. Shiro stood up and leaned heavily against the door frame as they watched her pull up a few screenshots of the comic books. “I sort of remember kids watching it when I was younger but I never got into it,” Shiro explained. “Honestly it’s one of those things you forget about right after watching it. Besides, cartoons back then were really shitty if you ask me.”

Keith leaned in to the screen, and nudged up his sunglasses to see better. He flicked between them, noting the condition of the first editions that were worth thousands nowadays. “You’ve gotta be shitting me— _this_ is why—?” he started, looking at Shiro with his red, watery eyes drawn open wide.

Shiro shrugged and said, “Yeah, this is why no one believes us.”

It looked like Keith wanted to scream, but he couldn’t. Instead, he turned away with his hands on his lips, and then dragged his palms over his face. It took months for Shiro to come to terms with the fact that something as simple as a comic could ruin everything for them. All their credibility. _Gone_. Every evidence they had—taken by the Garrison. Keith seemed to be on the same wavelength as Shiro.

“Well—the distress signals—” Keith suggested, and Shiro shrugged, crossing his arms. 

“If the Garrison kept them, they haven’t used them. They haven’t done _anything_ with them,” Shiro said. “And if the Galra are- Correction: Sorry Pidge, I meant that because the Galra _are_ on the Garrison’s side, then they _believe us_ , they’re just siding with the Galra.”

“What do they _want with us though?_ ” Keith hissed out, and whirled around to face Pidge’s message:

“PAYBACK.” She shoved it into Shiro’s chest and started scribbling down rapidly, tearing the page, and pulling out an old one as Shiro and Keith discussed. Eventually, she held up the logo to him, the one she doodled furiously after they made their break in the military vehicle. “Do you recognize this?”

Keith squinted at it, then at her, and snatched the logo up. “I don’t—I mean, it _looks_ familiar.”

“We think anything to do with this logo involves the Galra,” Shiro explained, leading Keith to frown. “But if they wanted to keep you under the radar in that regard, I imagine they wouldn’t have—”

“I-I don’t know, but I _think_ I’ve seen it before? Sort of… like how I vaguely r-remember the McDonald’s arches. Wait—are the tops rounded or pointed? I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently,” he confessed, clutching his hands to either side of his face. “ _Shit_. I haven’t been to McDonald’s in _so long…_ ”

Pidge started tugging on Shiro’s arm and shirt and grabbing at his face, that giddy look on her face as Shiro forcefully shoved her off with a bitter grumble. “We _aren’t_ getting McDonald’s—” But Pidge just whined harder in her own little way—specifically yanking on his arm and then threatening to shove her thumb into the stitches on his shoulder. He scrambled away from her and fell back into the back seat of the truck, cursing her, cursing McDonald’s, and yelling, “All _right!_ All right! We’ll go to McDonald’s!”

And that was how they all ended up back in the truck, with Pidge at the helm and Keith as her second-in-command—still slightly nauseous and short of breath now and again. They kept the windows open, and the radio on, regardless of how many times they argued over whether or not to stop Keith from switching the channels constantly. Shiro laid back on the back seat studying his nephew’s profile, and he found it hard to believe that any of this was real.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eyyy get a shamrock shake or somethin'. That's the only thing I've ever eaten at McDonald's.
> 
> I dunno how many of you have been around since _The Quilted Lion_ , but I'll be posting updates on that through [Twitter](https://twitter.com/geewiIIikers) because that seems like a more efficient way to go about things. But I'm a 19-year-old grandma with no sense of direction on Twitter, so it'll be a wild ride.


End file.
